


A Series of Sketches Done in Black Ink

by mustntgetmy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Art, Family Drama, Hurt/Comfort, Long-Term Relationship(s), Loss, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Slice of Life, Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-22 01:39:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 57,277
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15570921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mustntgetmy/pseuds/mustntgetmy
Summary: Non-magic AU. Sirius had always imagined the aftermath of falling in love would mean lightness, and an escape from all the horrors of his childhood. But the past never leaves, and even love can't stop bad memories from resurfacing.An almost year in the life of Sirius and Remus's first year as a couple replete with art and tangled sheets, and containing the following:  filled sketchbook pages from people lost and people found, terrible biscuits from an excellent therapist, mismatched music records, expensive hot chocolate, a lost brother, photographs (some invasive and some invoking terrible memories), a reckoning with the past, a promise of the future, and yet another ridiculously over the top Halloween party.





	A Series of Sketches Done in Black Ink

**Author's Note:**

> As this fic deals with mental health/going to therapy I just want to make clear that the therapy methods written about here are first and foremost meant to further along the plot and should probably not be used as a model for anyone who needs professional help. If you are suffering please know that you are not alone. I hope you find the help you need <3
> 
> A tremendous thank you to my partner in crime, FinalSoul. It's been an absolute blast working with you!
> 
> [Link to Art](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15578145)
> 
> Finally, this fic is a sequel to a fic I wrote in 2014, entitled "Within White Space." While you don't need to read it to understand anything that's going on here, you still might enjoy it!

When Sirius wakes he begins with Remus’s neck. First, the side with the scar: an angry red welt that, somehow, despite all the years he’s had it, still manages to look only newly healed. He kisses and licks and blows puffs of air into the curve of skin beneath his jawline. He spends longer here than he would normally spend on such a small stretch of skin so high above the waist. He does this partly so that Remus will wake and be able to decide whether to push him off so he can sleep more or to open his arms to him and begin kissing him back. He also does this as a way of saying _look at me kissing you here, feel me touching you here, understand that I love you and because this is a part of you I love it as well_. He picks this scar, rather than the ones on his torso – some of which are much knottier and angry looking – or the terrible gash in his leg, because he knows it is the one that Remus dislikes the most. This is the only scar of his that other people can easily see and comment on. This is the scar he struggles the most to hide. So Sirius moans over it, presses flattery down upon it, and hopes that Remus will let it sink in a little more each time he does it so maybe one day, when they go to take off each other’s clothes Remus won’t give him that look of apology and disbelief, the one that in a single glance says both _I’m sorry you have to see this_ and _Why do you even want to see this?_

This morning there’s none of that. There are times, Sirius is discovering, when Remus comes out of sleep full of only eagerness, when he pushes Sirius away from his neck not out of self-disgust, but because there are other areas he thinks Sirius’s lips better suited for. This Remus, needy and breathless, gasps and swears and demands. “There,” he insists, his hands threading through Sirius’s hair. “ _Yes_.”

 

Sirius delights in these moments when he can see Remus, who is usually so composed and self-contained, buck his hips and throw his head back, color rising in his cheeks, moaning with abandon, the perpetual creases and frown lines on his face smoothed out with pleasure. If he tries to say Sirius’s name he can only get through the first syllable of it and somehow this bastardization is the most gorgeous thing Sirius has ever heard and he tries as best as he can to make this last, he tries to let Remus linger in that place where there are no concerns about scars or canes or money, where there is only the friction and the heat, the intense desire.

 

When Remus comes his body makes a spectacular motion of surrender. There are times when this sudden arching, this look of unveiled joy across his face, is enough to make Sirius come, untouched. He shares this with Remus, lets him watch through his afterglow, and he says terrible, soppy things afterwards, things he has never thought about saying to anyone, things he didn’t even know he knew how to say. It’s nothing like “I love you,” which is easy enough, since it’s essentially just a statement of fact, and which they have both said to each other a half a dozen times. No, what he says are promises he has no idea if he can keep – always, always – as well as declarations of devotion – I’m yours, I’m yours. They are things that, once said, ought to embarrass him, but somehow they don’t. He watches Remus blush anew and if there’s time before Remus must go to work and he must go to class he loops his arm around Remus’s chest and says all these things again, slowly, so Remus will know he means them. Remus never says anything quite so dramatic back and Sirius is unsure if he should be scared of that or not. He has never been in love before. He has no idea what he should do.

 

So he does what he has always done and acts on instinct and impulse. The night before he came to the flat carrying a carton of blueberries and expensive syrup tucked into his jacket like contraband. In the morning, after Remus finally decides he has lingered in bed long enough and must go take a shower, he cuts the blueberries, mixes batter, and makes pancakes. When Remus steps out from his tiny bathroom into his tinier kitchen he finds Sirius holding a plate stacked with pancakes and coffee brewing on the stove. Sirius waves at the pancakes grandly, like a game show hostess showing off today’s prize and Remus laughs. “You didn’t have to do all this,” he says, as he always does when Sirius makes breakfast or sends him small presents at his job, like French chocolates or a nice fountain pen.

 

“I wanted to,” he says as _he_ always does, and he loves that they have established a routine for this, he loves the look Remus gives him in response, which is bashful, but also somehow admonishing. It’s the admonishing aspect he enjoys more, strange as it seems. He likes it that Remus will tell him off if he’s gone too far; it’s something that no one – not even James, sometimes – seems to do.

 

They eat the pancakes in bed, which is how Sirius knows that Remus’s leg is bothering him today. Normally, they’d stand at the window and comment on the passersby on the street below, Remus quick to invent clever stories for all the people passing and Sirius, trying not to laugh too hard, not wanting to know how much coffee will burn if it comes out through his nose. They tuck the blankets over their feet – it’s late February and bitter – and have a mild argument about Remus’s upcoming birthday.

 

“Don’t make a fuss,” Remus says, as if this kind of statement is at all compatible with Sirius’s nature.

 

“None of that, professor. You’ve got more than enough time to brace yourself for the inevitable, inexorable, and, frankly, well-deserved, fussing that I’m going to do. Though why you’d have to brace yourself for your own birthday I can’t imagine. It’s not as if you’re turning thirty.”

 

“Well, see, there you go. It’s not an especially important year anyway, so –”

 

“A fuss will be made!” Sirius exclaims, lifting his syrup stained fork righteously. “You’re my boyfriend now and you’re to be fussed over.”

 

Remus flushes, as he always does when Sirius claims him in this way, but his voice is steady and authoritative when he says, “Fine. We’ll do dinner or something. But no party. Do you hear me?”

 

“What? You mean you don’t want to find out how many people we can pack into this crackerbox flat?”

 

Remus just huffs and says, again, “No party.”

 

Sirius holds up his hands in surrender. “No party.”

 

Remus holds his gaze a moment, assessing him to see whether he’s telling the truth. When he’s satisfied that he is he gets up from the bed and takes their plates to the sink, leaning heavily on his cane. Sirius joins Remus at the counter to dry the dishes – something he’s never done before in his life – and find that it’s his turn to blush when Remus begins leaning on him instead of his cane. He knows how difficult this sort of vulnerability is for Remus because he works each night at soothing it and he feels warm all over when Remus rests his head on his shoulder and sighs. “It looks icy out,” he says, so that he doesn’t have to say he doesn’t feel up to going out walking today.

 

“Let’s stay in then,” Sirius suggests. “We can see about those records you’ve got in your closet.”

 

Remus laughs. “Yes! We can finally solve the mystery of the previous occupant!”

 

They go back into the bedroom, where Sirius retrieves the record player and stack of records that had been left behind by the previous occupant of Remus’s flat. They have been debating whether the occupant was an old person who never deigned to move beyond their technological comfort zone, or simply a hipster. The records are all in brown paper sheaths and Remus won’t let him see the labels as he puts them, one by one, onto the player and sets the needle.

 

The first record Sirius recognizes instantly – Vivaldi – and the second takes him a moment. “Glenn Miller,” he says cautiously, and Remus nods, and stops the player to put the next record on. “This feels pretty conclusive already,” Sirius says and Remus grins, says, “Does it?” just as The Sex Pistols begin to play. “Huh,” Sirius says and then, “huh,” again when the next album – The Decembrists – is put on. “A cultured hipster then,” he says decisively, even as Remus is putting yet another album on. The opening strains of a tango fill the bedroom and are swiftly and sweetly followed by a man’s deep voice. Sirius has never heard this song or voice before and the man is singing in Spanish, but he knows enough of the language to know that the song is about longing and regret.

 

“Carlos Gardel,” Remus says when the song is over and he’s stopped the record to read its label.

 

“I am so confused,” Sirius says after a pause. “Who the hell used to live here?”

 

Remus laughs and they put on a few more albums, the former occupant becoming ever more convoluted and complicated as each album proves more various than the last. Eventually, they give up trying to categorize the former occupant and Remus reaches beneath the record player to pull out one last album, this one in a proper cover instead of a brown paper sheath. Sirius, who has grown to enjoy waiting for the music to begin before knowing what it is, doesn’t look at the record cover, just waits for the music to play.

 

Again, the song that plays is old and sweet, tender and rendered dreamy by a sweep of string instruments beneath the singer’s voice, but this time Sirius recognizes it instantly. He smiles a bit, relaxing into the song, into the woman’s familiar voice running pleasingly over the lyrics, which are in French, and which he knows by heart. It is the first song he ever remembers having listened to over and over, needing it near. He had been very young, perhaps only four or five, and yet the romance in the lyrics had beckoned to him. It had made him want to be married – which was then his only concept of what love might look like – and he had asked his mother if he could have a wife for his birthday. She had told him that marriage was for grown-ups, but the next afternoon he had come down from his lessons to find that she had bought him a little black puppy with a green ribbon around its neck and a note attached to the ribbon. _Something sweet for you to love in the meantime_ , the note had said, and though she had not given him the present in person it was still the only memory from his childhood that he could look back on wholly with fondness. It was also the only time he could ever remember his mother addressing the word “love” to him.

 

He has spoken about this to very few people – he does not like to discuss his childhood or his family – and so although he is not surprised when Remus says, “I got this for you,” because he had only recounted this story to him a few days ago, he is still so moved and overwhelmed that he has to close his eyes and breathe deeply for a moment. With his eyes still closed he leans his head onto Remus’s shoulder, takes his hand and squeezes. “Thank you,” he murmurs, and Remus, ever polite, even in bed, says, “You’re welcome,” and squeezes his hand back. Soon, the song is over and the album plays on with more songs of love and heartbreak. They listen to the whole album in near silence, going to lie on Remus’s bed. If it weren’t for Remus’s leg Sirius might’ve tried to get him to dance, but since he can’t he instead wraps his arms around Remus and rubs circles on his lower back in time to the music.

 

“I love you,” he tells him, when the album has finished and the flat has been quiet for some minutes. Remus kisses him in reply, a shiveringly sweet sensation. He begins to run his hands along Sirius’s sides, gently at first, and then more insistently. He slips his fingers beneath the waistband of Sirius’s trousers and Sirius huffs out an exclamation, trying to still his hips, wanting this to last, delighted that Remus is initiating because in the months they’ve been together he’s only started to do so recently. He lifts his hips so that Remus can pull down his trousers and pants and in the moment it takes him to bend his head and begin licking Sirius’s cock Sirius has time to wonder just how fucked up it is that he wants to see Remus tied up in ribbons like a present, like something set out for him to love.

 

He moans and makes his usual pleas, his thighs brushing against Remus’s cheeks, his hands tightening on the bedspread, but his mind refuses to quiet even as he comes. _Please_ , he thinks, his body arching, his breath coming in jags out of his throat. _Please. I have never wanted anything but this. Please, don’t let me ruin this. Please, don’t let me fuck this up. Please, let him stay with me_.

 

Outside, snow falls down onto the ice, and the grayness of the day deepens. Sirius rises from the bed he will sleep in tonight – and tomorrow night as well, for this weekend will be the first they spend two consecutive days together – to untangle his trousers from his legs and pull off his shirt. He comes back, straddling Remus with a grin, and begins to kiss his neck.

 

…

 

“You are, officially, the worst person I know,” James tells him the following Thursday afternoon.

 

“Hm?” Sirius says, slowly coming back to himself and realizing that instead of glancing over James’ chemistry homework like he promised he’d do, he has instead scribbled out a love poem he has come to associate with Remus. James grabs the paper from him, reads the poem, and wrinkles his nose in disgust.

 

“The absolute worst,” he says. “I only thank God that your first Valentine’s Day with him has passed. The soppiness I had to endure. I don’t think I can bear it again.”

 

“You might not want to relax just yet. His birthday is in a few weeks.”

 

“Oh, _Jesus_.”

 

Sirius laughs; James’ teasing is halfhearted, done for theatrical value at most. He knows that James is happy for him. James had actually been very encouraging of their relationship before it had even begun. “He’s upstairs. Alone. Snog him, snog him, _snog him_ ,” he had told Sirius, albeit drunkenly, at the Halloween party where Sirius and Remus had first kissed.

 

Still, Sirius knows that in the following months he has become horrifically soppy. So he tells James, “We need to get you shacked up. See how terrible _you_ become.”

 

James makes a dismissive noise as Sirius scans the library. He doesn’t have to look for long: at a table not far from theirs is the usual suspect, a classmate of theirs who Sirius sees giving James the eye at least once a week.

 

“There,” he says quietly, nodding his chin in her direction.

 

James turns to look and then shoots Sirius a scowl. “Evans?” he whispers. “You think I should ask out _Evans_? Christ, Sirius, even I’m not egotistical enough to think I’ve got a chance with her. Plus, doesn’t she already have a boyfriend?”

 

“What, Snape? Please. They’re just friends. Though naturally I’d imagine he’d like things to be a bit different.” When Sirius sees that James still looks unconvinced he goes on, “Go on. Ask her. What’s the harm? Didn’t you two have a moment or something during that biology project you did together last term?”

 

James sighs. “She probably doesn’t even remember we worked on anything together. I don’t think she even knows my name.”

 

Sirius, resisting the urge to grab James by the lapels and shake him, as Lily Evans most certainly knew his name, and in fact used it every single time they passed in the hall, and who was, presently, giving him a longing and hopeful look, says, “If you don’t ask her out then whenever we’re together I’ll speak of nothing but my undying ardor for Remus.”

 

“You wouldn’t dare.”

 

Sirius raises an eyebrow. “Have I told you yet that Remus has twelve distinct smiles, each better than the last? No? Alright, let’s start with the first one. This one is kind of a half-smile and he does it when he’s just waking up and we’re together in bed and it is so –”

 

“You’re a real son of a bitch, Black, you know that?” James says, rising from the table, his cheeks pinking as he glances over at Lily.

 

“Shut up, straighten your shirt, and smile, Potter. No, not like that. You look like a serial killer. Like you’ve just played a scrimmage and done well. Yes. Like that. Brilliant. Now, go forth and win fair maiden!”

 

“I despise you,” James says between his teeth as he begins to walk towards Lily, nervously running a hand through his hair as he goes. Sirius stays long enough to know that it’s going to be a success: he sees Lily straighten as James comes near, sees her smile and nod yes a tad too exuberantly when he asks if he can sit.

 

Sirius leaves the library whistling, earning a glare from Mrs. Pince. He strolls through the campus practically feeling the bounce in his step. It’s almost lunchtime, which means it’s almost time to go to the café he usually meets Remus at for lunch. On Thursdays he can stay with Remus the longest, since he doesn’t have any afternoon classes, and he’s just stopped into the bathroom to make sure his own shirt is smoothed and straightened when he receives a phone call. Hardly anyone calls him – really, it’s just James, Remus, and Peter – and so he answers without looking, trilling out a cherry, “Hallo!”

 

“Sirius.”

 

He goes cold, a knot in his stomach forming and tightening.

 

“Mother,” he says, and then cannot bring himself to say anything more.

 

“I see from your schedule that you’re done for the day,” she says, her voice as cool and remote as starlight. “I expect you home in half an hour. We need to have a discussion.”

 

His fingers tighten on the phone, and in the mirror his face compresses into a grimace. If anyone else, including Remus, had given him an order in this way, in this tone, he would’ve torn into that person, allowed himself to sound angry. But now, with her, all he says is, “Yes, Mother,” and waits for her to dismiss him by hanging up. When she does he forces himself to leave the bathroom and start walking, calling Remus to cancel their lunch date as he does. He apologizes and apologizes but Remus says it’s fine, tells him that they can have dinner tonight instead. “Are you okay?” Remus asks, after Sirius has apologized again. “You sound strange.”

 

“I’m just – I love you, Remus,” he says in a rush. He feels half-hysterical, like he might never get the chance to see Remus again, like there’s a war on and he’s just been given his draft papers. He has never, ever received a phone call from his mother and had it been good news.

 

“I love you too, Sirius,” Remus says instantly, and from the frankness in which he says it Sirius knows that he’s alone somewhere, and his heart aches at the thought of that. The hysteria rises and he almost feels like crying. Images pass before his eyes: drowned animals, knives dripping blood, a man alone in a room having a conversation with himself, a woman’s lace stocking tied around a severed arm. All of it black. The sick, sad joke of his name, of his life.

 

“Are you okay?” Remus asks again. “Do you need help?”

 

He cannot make himself lie to Remus. “I will be okay,” he says, because he hopes so. “And you can help me by making a dessert I can lick off of you.”

 

Remus laughs, throatily, and Sirius tells him good-bye. He has reached the edge of the university’s campus and he sees that his family’s car is there, waiting for him. He gets inside and endures the long ride through the city in silence, his hand convulsing around his phone, which he has not yet put away. He tries not to think the most dangerous thought, but it forms within him anyway. _Regulus_ , he thinks. _This is about Regulus_.

 

By the time the car pulls up in front of Grimmauld Place he feels as if it’s been days instead of minutes since he was in the library with James, teasing him and prodding him into asking out Lily. He gets out of the car slowly, unworried about how he looks or how he seems to anyone who passes – he has been trained since birth to always look unruffled and unconcerned, no matter what is actually happening inside him – and goes into the house.

 

The moment he enters he knows that there are other people there. He hears a murmuring male voice and he immediately jumps to a conclusion: police. This is it then. He’s finally going to know.

 

Just as he’s bracing himself to hear whatever answer might be given him he hears movement on the stairs above and sees two people coming down, both of whom are definitely not police. It is a woman and a man, and when they come to an abrupt standstill on the stairs when they spot Sirius they both exchange a conspiratorial look with one another before calling his name in greeting.

 

“Cousin,” Bellatrix says, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “It’s been far too long. How’s that school of yours keeping you?”

 

Sirius says nothing. He had half-expected to see Bellatrix here – she always seemed to know when bad news was coming and she would hover, vulture-like, in the periphery if she thought there was something she could gain from it – and he had long ceased to be annoyed by her presence in his life. It is the man he stares at now, and it is the man he first addresses.

 

“What are you doing here, Riddle?”

 

Riddle, his pale skin practically aglow in the dim of the house, smiles down at Sirius indulgently. He is the son of a foreign duke, or so he claims; he has never been able to show enough proof of his lineage to convince Sirius. He arrived in the city as a young man and in the past ten or so years he has somehow managed to insert himself into the lives of the most powerful and influential families in the city. He knows things – dark, terrible things – about each family and there is always the implication that this information is up for sale. (Another point against his supposed dukedom: what duke would bother to sink so low?) Sirius has heard rumors that this is not all Riddle has a hand in.

 

“Why, I’m merely here to pay a visit to your mother, Mr. Black,” Riddle says now, still smiling.

 

“My mother is ill,” Sirius says through his teeth. “She ought not to be disturbed.”

 

Bellatrix takes a step toward Sirius, beginning to spit out something angry and vitriolic, but Riddle puts a hand on her shoulder and she stills instantly.

 

“I would never dream of disturbing your mother,” Riddle says. “I’m only here because she sent for me. It would seem that she needed some – ah, how to put it? – advice.”

 

Beside Riddle, Bellatrix straightens, a triumphant look in her eyes, and Sirius begins to worry anew: why on earth would his mother summon Riddle?

 

“I see,” Sirius says tightly. “Well, I need to see to her now, so if you’ll be so kind as to show yourselves out I’d appreciate it.”

 

Bellatrix glances once more at Riddle before they finish descending the stairs. As she passes him she whispers, “I never knew you were so charitable, cousin. Though perhaps you’re simply being swindled. That, or you’re blind.” Her grin widens as she sees his look of confusion and then she turns, hurrying back to Riddle’s side.

 

Sirius takes the stairs two at a time, bypassing decades of family portraits in an instant. Only once he gets to the landing that houses his mother’s room does he slow and pause to once more smooth his shirt and be sure that his tie is straight. He wonders, as he often has of late, if he’ll ever be able to feel like an adult in his mother’s presence. Going to her bedside is the most effective time travel he knows of. Enter her room, see her lying there, and immediately become five again.

 

“Mother,” he says as he walks in, forcing himself to keep his voice even, and not to turn the word into a question like he would’ve done when he was actually five. “I’m here.”

 

“It’s patently obvious that you’re here, Sirius,” Mrs. Black says, snapping shut the book she’d been reading. “There’s no need to be redundant.”

 

“Of course, Mother,” he says, and has to stop himself for apologizing for the gaffe of announcing his presence.

 

She watches him as he crosses in front of her bed to the chair that’s been set up next to her for visitors. Her eyes follow his movements as her head stays still, an unnerving habit of hers that Sirius has always longed to tell her to stop. He sits in the chair and affects a disinterested air, plucking an invisible piece of lint from the cuff of his shirt as he says, “You’re looking well.” It’s the truth: there are days when he comes in and sees her lying flattened against the bed as if pinned there, her hair fanned out on the pillow in an oil slick spill, her breathing so heavy it’s audible all the way across the room. Her eyes are the worst then, pained and angry, and he knows that though he has disappointed her in many ways, all of which she’s thoroughly reprimanded him for, it is this that is his worst sin in her eyes: that he has seen her this way, undone and made defenseless by disease and pain.

 

Today is not like this. Today her hair is freshly washed and pulled back, and she sits erect in the bed, wearing a silk dressing gown expensive enough to cover Remus’s rent for two months. He knew she would be like this when she called; she never drew him into her room when she was in the depths of her disease willingly.

 

She gives a curt nod to his compliment and responds with, “Your hair needs cutting.”

 

“Perhaps,” he concedes graciously, knowing she no longer has the capacity to drag him kicking and crying to the salon.

 

She narrows her eyes at him, and they are his eyes, a cool storm cloud gray. He does not ask her why she called, knowing that she’ll deflect until the second she’s ready to tell him, but he also does not make small talk with her, not caring to hear her complain about the nurses or the state of the world. So instead they sit in silence for minutes while his stomach clenches into ever tightening knots, and he wonders if she’s trying to find the words to tell him that the police were by and that they’ve finally found Regulus’s body, that he really is dead, not just missing.

 

When she inhales loudly his stomach makes its tightest knot yet because he can tell she’s ready to speak.

 

“Regulus,” she says, and Sirius can feel tears already behind his eyes, his heartbeat in his throat. “Regulus…” And then she squints at him, cocking her head, and he wants to cry for an entirely different reason.

 

“Sirius,” he says, doing his best to keep any gentleness out of his voice because any hint of caring only makes her more ill-tempered in these unfortunate aftermaths. “I’m Sirius, Mother.”

 

He hands her the glasses she keeps on the bedside table so that they can pretend the problem is only with her eyes. She accepts them without comment, puts them on, and then says, “Ah, yes. Sirius.” She pauses, squints again. “Your hair needs cutting.”

 

“Yes, well, I was on the way to the barber before you called me here,” he prompts.

 

She nods and her face regains its cool composure. “Some unfortunate information has come to my attention,” she says, and for the first time he notices that there’s a manila envelope lying next to her on the bed. He sees no papers sticking out of its sides and assumes that what’s in it must be photographs. He steels himself, waits and watches while her hand creeps slowly across the covers to grasp it. She holds his gaze a moment longer before at last passing him the folder saying, perplexingly, “I don’t know why I’m surprised. You always did love your nasty little shocks.”

 

He frowns, opens the folder, and sees that he was correct to expect photographs. But they are not photographs of Regulus or, mercifully, photographs of Regulus’s body. They are, instead, photographs of him. And Remus.

 

There they are, the two of them, at the café by school, various pastries and elaborately coiffed coffees on the table between them, their hands sometimes interlocked on top of or beneath the table; then again the pair of them walking the streets, again holding hands (and Sirius can remember these particular dates since it’s so rare for Remus to feel well enough to hold the cane and a hand); both of them together on Valentine’s Day, when Sirius paid a bookstore owner to close early so that they could have dinner inside in the poetry section, with real roses but fake candles so Remus wouldn’t panic about fire; and finally there are photographs from the Sunday before last, the two of them in front of a pet shop window, Sirius’s arms thrown around Remus’s waist, their smiles reflected in the glass. In each photograph there is nothing intimate in the camera’s gaze – neither he nor Remus ever looks into the lens – and so it’s obvious that the pictures were taken from far away, from someone who went unobserved by the two of them. And though he understands what this means he also can’t help but note that the photographs are each beautiful, in their way, just as photographs of the Earth taken from the moon are beautiful: from such a remote position it is possible to see just how vast and perfect something is, how lucky we are to have it. In a few of the pictures Sirius can see how Remus’s gaze has slipped and gone to observe someone else around them, and the difference in his expression from when he’s looking at Sirius is startling and makes Sirius feel like he’s just downed a glass of champagne, all bubbly and floaty inside. But the bubbliness is quick to turn to queasiness because, again, he knows what these photographs mean. It means that they were followed, that someone was paid to stalk them. They are a violation, a smear of mud on the purest thing he’s ever held; and most significantly, and most upsettingly, his mother had thought it worth her limited energies to call him here to discuss them.

 

“Fascinating,” he snaps out, tossing the folder back onto the bed, where it lands just shy of her hip. “Who knew that Duke Riddle was so good with a camera? Or is this Bella’s handiwork?”

 

“That is no matter,” she says, like he’s stupid, like he can’t put two and two together. God, what had she paid them? Bellatrix had certain jewels she was hoping for, but Riddle had weightier requests. “The issue at hand is your reputation,” she goes on, “and your marriage prospects.”

 

He almost laughs, but he’s still feeling queasy enough that he thinks some of his breakfast might come up with it. Fear begins to chase the queasiness, and in its wake comes a far, far worse feeling: pity.

 

“How could you be so foolish and improper, Sirius? This – you aren’t even trying to conceal it. You are out in broad daylight making a mockery of your upbringing, of our family, declaring yourself –” and here she lowers her voice and spits “—a sodomite, a pervert, and doubtless spending a fortune on this – this _urchin_!” This she said with more venom than any insult she had leveled at Sirius, poverty being the worst possible crime to her. “It is grotesque, and I am frankly shocked that our names have yet to appear in the society pages. Mr. Riddle assured me he’ll do everything in his power to prevent this, but you are playing a very dangerous game here. These unseemly risks you’re taking do more than jeopardize you and our family. You could be arrested!”

 

“Mother,” he says, his breath tight in his throat, “I won’t be.”

 

“Doubtless you know the right people to pay off – you’re like your father in that way. All the same I urge you –”

 

“They don’t arrest people for that any more. They haven’t for years.”

 

She stares at him, more out of shock at his interruption than at what he had actually said. He has to look at a spot just over her shoulder to continue.

 

“We won’t appear in the society pages because men dating each other isn’t sordid news anymore. Not even in your circles.” He forces himself to look in her eyes as he asks, “Do you…do you know what year it is, Mother?”

 

She huffs, looks affronted. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sirius. All these lies. Mr. Riddle has told me…” And here he turns away, can no longer listen to her. He has to close his eyes against the thought of Riddle, sitting in this very chair, and his delighted expression as he spoke to his mother and realized just how much control he could have over her. It would be a way of controlling Sirius as well, for no one outside the immediate family knew the extent to which Mrs. Black’s mental health had deteriorated. He feels queasy, yet again, over this, for if it were up to him it would be no great secret. It was for her he kept silent, for the moments, like now, when she sits proud and straight-backed, commanding, the mother of his childhood.

 

A mother who had never told him she loved him, a mother who had habitually fired his favorite nannies to deprive him of easy affection, a mother who cared more for the straightness of his clothes than the pain of his injuries.

 

A mother he should have been permitted to hate in his adulthood, to blame for all his many issues, but who, instead, he is forced to pity. Because she no longer remembers the year, and she cannot tell the difference between him and his brother, and she confuses the laws of the past with the laws of the present. It is unjust to have to feel for her the way he does for birds with broken wings and children lost in the park, but the most unjust thing is that even as she slides away, even as she forgets him, she remains herself: proud, spiteful, hurtful. It stings to know that there is no tenderness beneath the façade, no buried girlhood hopes or gentleness. The walls peel back only to reveal more walls, as foreboding and constraining as the very walls of this house, as he has always known her to be. And so he feels pity for her, but never love.

 

She is now threatening his inheritance, which makes the fear Sirius had felt earlier return. She’s getting worse: he had told her, only a few days ago, that she needed his signature if she wanted to withdraw any money from her accounts as they were no longer her accounts, but his, the family’s finances having fallen under his total control. When she’d realized what little leverage she’d had on him had vanished her rage had been apocalyptic, but in just a few days she had forgotten her rage, her shame, and that he was free to do whatever and fuck whoever he pleased. He listens to her run the usual course of her threats, flinching only when she mentions Regulus, her more dutiful, well-behaved son. He doesn’t understand himself in these moments, can’t comprehend why he doesn’t just get up and leave – it isn’t as if she’d remember – or why he doesn’t say something back to her, the things he’s always longed to say. The sense that he is only a child is all-consuming, and the pity rises in his throat like bile, and so he waits out her ranting until she rings for the nurse and demands a glass of wine of the vintage that was served at her wedding, and which she can no longer drink as it conflicts with her medicine.

 

Dutifully, he kisses the air beside her cheek and rises, discretely gathering up the manila envelope, confers briefly with the nurse over the state of his mother’s health, and then summons the housekeeper, Kreacher, to inform him that Mr. Riddle is no longer welcome on the premises.

 

It is still early in the day, though you couldn’t tell that from the gloom in the house. He stands for long minutes on the second floor landing, looking down at the line of family portraits, wondering whether there are things in his mother’s blood that are contagious. Or, worse, if there are things in his father’s blood that are.

 

Though he has plenty of time to make it he calls Remus and cancels dinner.

 

…

 

He doesn’t see Remus the next day, or the day after that. He claims illness, and indeed he does go to the doctor, but the doctor tells him nothing new. Too young and too soon to tell. He leaves with the usual list of vitamin supplements, which he has been taking religiously since he turned twenty-one and his family fell, with violent finality, to pieces. He spends the rest of the day in bed, imagining his mind is an island soon to be beset by fog. The wallpaper in his room, a pale, gloomy gray, makes him nervous and he wonders if that’s a sign of something. He orders Kreacher to have the wallpaper changed to pale yellow, which, in the studies he’s read is the color most likely to improve your mood. He sleeps in one of the guest rooms after seeking aid in the wine cellar, and in the morning he’s still too drunk to study for the test he has later in the afternoon. He begs the professor for a different exam date, which he receives (and no surprise – his family is one of the university’s largest donors), and spends the rest of the day trying to ignore his mother screaming at the nurse down the hall.

 

The following day he finally sees Remus again and knows from the way Remus pauses before accepting when he calls to make the date that he has to make it up to him – or make excuses. He ends up opting for a little bit of both. He books dinner at the only pricey restaurant they’ve been to that hasn’t made Remus feel out of place or underdressed – an authentic Argentinian steakhouse, replete with the requisite photos of Carlitos – to show that this is a serious date, all puns intended. Over their first glasses of vermouth he makes his apologies: “I know, I know I’ve been AWOL. It’s been a mad few days.” He pauses here, unable to resist a dark chuckle. “There’ve been a ton of exams, but mostly it’s been stuff in the house. My mother,” he says the words delicately, and lets them sit there, feels that any intimation of her is explanation enough. It has always been this way with James and Peter; the mere mention of her stops all questions, the way her presence at a doorway used to stop any noises or laughter in the room beyond.

 

But Remus – and he should’ve known this – does not brook excuses. He raises an eyebrow, drops his gaze briefly to his untouched vermouth, then says, without any excess of the gentle pity that makes these sorts of conversations so terrible, “Is she getting worse?”

 

“She’s not getting any better,” he responds. He realizes it sounds like more obfuscation, but he can’t bear to answer Remus’s question with an affirmative. He knows well enough that she’s bad; to say it would give it more weight than it already has, and it’s a ship-sinking anchor in him already.

 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Remus says sincerely. “Do you think –”

 

Sirius clears his throat, cuts him off, does the thing he does when people press – rattles off medical terms and the names of medications – and hates that he’s doing it to Remus. _You’re already ruining this_ , he thinks.

 

He’s spared further inquiry when the steaks arrive, thickly cut and Remus’s oozing red when he takes his knife to it. “Run it through a warm room,” he’d told the waiter the last time they were here, when he was in a mood good enough for whimsy. Today he had just said rare, but the meat comes out the same: bright pink in the middle, melting between his teeth. His eyelashes dip when he takes his first bite, a fleeting moment where he takes obvious pleasure in the taste, and Sirius sees this as an opening he just can’t pass by.

 

“Return of the wolf,” he teases, and at precisely the right moment: just as Remus’s tongue darts out to lick at his lips.

 

Remus smiles at this, remembering what Sirius is remembering: the Halloween party where they’d shared their first kiss. Remus, dressed as a wolf – or werewolf, he’d never made it clear – and Sirius as a criminal standing together in Sirius’s bedroom, and Remus pulling Sirius into the roughest, best kiss he’d ever had in his life. He smiles over this, though the fact that it happened in Grimmauld Place, rooms down from his mother’s sick bed, falls like a shadow through the memory, darkening it a shade.

 

But his smile holds, and Remus returns it and that’s all he needs.

 

“That should be no surprise,” Remus says, delicately using his knife to slide another bite onto his fork, “it _is_ a full moon after all.”

 

Sirius laughs, delighted that Remus knows this. The combined force of his laughter and the cheeky way Remus takes his next bite of steak – deliberately wolfish this time, a rough motion of his incisors against the meat, the intimation of a growl in his throat when the bite comes free – breaks the spell of tension between them. Sirius recalls that there will be an exhibition of a modern artist Remus loves in a nearby museum starting next Wednesday. Remus, who relies on the often out-dated newspapers his employer leaves lying around for his news, is pleasantly shocked by this news, and even more so by the fact that Sirius has already obtained tickets. The evening then turns more decisively towards the enjoyable, the lingering unpleasant of Sirius’s disappearance the past few days dissipating. The both of them get a little drunker than they usually do – Fernet chasing the vermouth, before turning round to chase after them. They spill out of the restaurant on liquid limbs, finding their feet but only barely. Sirius is trying to be mindful of Remus’s leg, has an arm around his shoulders even as he feels he might stumble and fall himself. But Remus’s leg must not be hurting him tonight because before Sirius can hail them a cab Remus pushes him against the wall of the alley beside the restaurant and kisses him, ferociously. The resulting effect is that Sirius feels twice as drunk as he had before but also somehow more awake. When he opens his eyes Remus has pulled his head back to lick and kiss at him, and his own gaze lifts to the sky, a swath of darkness with no stars but two full, shining moons. The second moon is a gift from the alcohol and Remus, who is making his pulse thump and his vision swim from the way he’s licking against his skin. But both moons look so real – each a perfect silver circle, striated gray by distant valleys – that he can not tell the difference between the true moon and the illusion. He knows a single, sober moment of worry, caught on the threshold between real and unreal, his mind perhaps at its first faltering, but then Remus’s hands were at the buckle of his belt and it doesn’t matter.

 

His zip goes down loud, startling the both of them into remembering where they are. There is a pause, the both of them finding each other’s eyes in the alley’s near darkness, both sets of pupils wide and hungry, Remus’s fingers clenching and unclenching on the waistband of Sirius’s trousers.

 

Sirius licks his lips, the moons wobbling when he breaks Remus’s gaze for a second to glance up to make sure they’re both there. Through sheer strength of will he drags his gaze back down and finds his voice.

 

“We…we could call a cab. To your flat.” The brusque rasp of his whispering draws shivers down his own spine; he is nothing, he supposes, if not a little narcissistic.

 

“We could,” Remus agrees, and seems to shiver too. Sirius can feel the hardness of him pressing through the tangle of his coat and undone trousers. He barely thinks before he begins to writhe against him, making his eyes roll back and a gasp come out from between his clenched teeth. He stops when he hears this, remembering the nearby street and the perplexing double moon, although he only recognizes both things on a subliminal level, can no longer recall their actual significance.

 

“We should…” Sirius tries to say, struggling to remember, and then Remus cuts in: “But I _need_ you. Now.”

 

The naked hunger in Remus’s voice brings on what feels like a full body flush; the heat touches every part of him, and now he can’t remember why he even wanted to remember. He crushes his lips to Remus’s but from there Remus takes over, teeth back at his jaw and neck, hands dipping beneath his waistband. Sirius jolts at the touch of his fingers, which are cold from the wintry night air. Only this night feels very warm to Sirius, especially as Remus starts to stroke and resumes his nipping and licking along his jaw and neck. Sirius realizes, with a moaning start, that Remus is tracing his tongue over Sirius on the exact spot where his scar is on his own neck. It may be that he’s marking Sirius as his, or that he’s reciprocating the same sort of adoration that Sirius means with his own touches, or he –

 

Footsteps and voices pass very close to the alley opening. They both thrill in time at their near discovery, and it doesn’t matter what Remus means by his touch, it doesn’t matter like the two moons in the sky no longer matter, the only thing that matters is that he gets Remus’s flies undone and feels his cock pressed against his own.

 

It’s a rough thing between them now, rutting more than lovemaking, animal urgency and bite marks rising all along Sirius’s skin from Remus’s teeth. It hurts in the way all pain should, a shock that roots him to the moment, that lets him feel, more deeply, the way Remus’s hand is wrapped around the both of them, stroking, thumb swiping deliciously, quick, rising heat.

 

They have never gone this fast before, never mind being upright and outside. _You could be arrested_ , he thinks, her voice a horrific intrusion, forcefully pushed aside by other voices on the street nearing, nearing. _It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter,_ he reminds himself, the only words he seems to remember as with a twist of his wrist Remus pushes him up and over the edge.

 

He shakes, feels Remus press his face into his shoulder to muffle his own moan as he comes. The cold sweeps in with the afterglow, his breath a thick plume over Remus’s bent head, and he feels the sharp edges of the bricks in the wall behind him. Remus is still shaking, though now with incredulous laughter. “Oh my God,” he says, lifting his head, his hand over his mouth, rather belatedly looking over his shoulder at the mouth of the alley. Sirius laughs too, can’t help it at the sight of them standing there with their dicks out in the freezing February cold.

 

“I never –” Remus is saying as Sirius does the work of concealing them both from view, the zips going up far more carefully than they had gone down. “Oh, wow, I never, never thought I’d ever do something like that, that was so –”

 

“That was brilliant,” Sirius says, because it was. He’s still running hot with the shock and thrill of it, the cold barely seeming to touch his skin. He straightens Remus’s coat, feels him shaking still with the aftershocks of laughter, his cheeks full of pink blooms from the cold and the sex and also the shock of his daring, perhaps, but not with embarrassment. No trace of shame mars Remus’s features that night, not even when they pull each other into a kiss on the corner and a group of drunken revelers whoops loudly at them from the opposite side of the street. He laughs then as Sirius flips them the bird and keeps kissing him, the taste of his trembling breath between Sirius’s lips, Fernet and mint and reckless joy.

 

 _I can give this to you_ , Sirius thinks when they finally hail their cab. _I can make you look this way always, feel this way always. I can, I can, I swear I can_.

 

He throws his arm around Remus’s shoulder, kisses his temple, never mind what the cabbie thinks. Remus is still buzzing over what they just did; he shivers throughout the entire ride, and begins to laugh again in the stairwell of his building, pulling Sirius into another kiss that anyone walking by could see.

 

“Can you stay tonight?” he asks, when they come up for air and he’s fumbling in his pocket for his keys.

 

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” Sirius answers immediately, honestly.

 

They half fall into the flat, clutching at each other again, barely making it to the bed. Remus hisses in pain over the sloppiness of their walk, and that makes them go slower once they’re on top of the bedcovers, Sirius smoothing kisses onto his skin until his breathing is harsh only from wanting.

 

The windows are open and the room is awash in gauzy city lights. And it is, unquestionably, a beautiful night: two moons in the sky, Remus naked and glowing palely on the bed, and Sirius’s hands and mouth running over him, soft and sure over his skin. If in his life he ever needed to draw on a past moment of bliss, this night in bed with Remus would be a top contender, given second place only after their first night together.

 

In Remus’s eyes, afterwards, he can read the same sort of sentiment. He lets Sirius look at him for far longer than he normally does, receives Sirius’s compliments without a flinch or derision, tracing Sirius’s eyebrow and giving his own compliments, which are rare, so rare. “I could draw you forever,” he whispers, and Sirius preens unabashedly. He falls asleep shortly afterwards, burrowed beneath the covers and wrapped in Sirius’s arms, but Sirius can’t sleep. He looks out the window, the curtains still opened, and sees that the second moon is gone. He thinks, blearily, that Remus must have taken it with him into dreaming, and finds that at once lovely and frustrating, as every left awake lover must feel when sharing a bed with a partner who falls swiftly to sleep. He draws small circles on his back – little moons – and tries to follow, but ends up watching the true moon through the night as it falls, slowly, down the curve of the sky, and sees the quiet moment when morning rises to catch it all along the horizon.

 

…

 

Over the following weeks everything goes back to the way it should be. Sirius attends all his classes without fail, prevails in his make-up exam, dutifully endures James’s excited, soppy chatter about Lily (their first two dates had gone very promisingly), goes to a few underwhelming parties hosted by Peter, and receives no further phone calls from his mother. And, of course, in all the remaining hours in between he sees Remus.

 

Their dates take them from museum to bookshop and back again, with the occasional interlude at the university café or Remus’s flat. It is proving to be a dreary, cold winter and as much as Remus enjoys the dusty calm of museums and bookstores it’s plain that he’s growing tired of the constant need to be cloistered away from the cold. His leg hurts him more when they take their increasingly infrequent walks, and he reveals to Sirius a long held bitterness for the length of this season and how it always seemed to mar his birthday with freezing winds and sleet. Sirius hums his sympathy, but is secretly pleased: the arrangements he’s made for Remus’s birthday are looking like they’ll be well-received.

On the eve of Remus’s birthday Sirius secrets a travel bag into the back of a rental car and tells Remus he wants to go for a ride.

 

“And where are we taking a ride to?” Remus asks with a raised eyebrow, peering over his shoulder into the backseat of the car, as if he expects to find the answer to his question there.

 

“Such a suspicious tone!”

 

“I know what tomorrow is, Sirius,” Remus begins warningly.

 

“Oh, dammit, d’you mean you haven’t forgotten the date of your own birthday? Boy are my plans cooked.”

 

Remus ignores this and plows on with what he’d been saying, “And we had better not be going to a party. I am in no mood to act cheerful over aging – _or_ to have to watch Peter vomit into a punch bowl again.”

 

Sirius snorts, recalling the first and only party at Peter’s place he’d taken Remus to. “He really should’ve know better than to take me up on that dare, don’t you think?”

 

“ _Sirius_.”

 

“Don’t you worry, professor. I promise you, we’re not going to a party.”

 

Sirius sees Remus’s posture relaxing ever so slightly out of the corner of his eye. Still, he says, stiffly, “We’re headed in the direction of Peter’s flat.”

 

“Remus, do you honestly think that with all my brilliance and genius – stop laughing! – that I couldn’t think of anything better to do for your birthday than go to bloody Peter’s?”

 

“I suppose,” Remus allows, and his posture relaxes further. “But where are we going then?”

 

“Are you aware, professor, of the concept of a surprise?”

 

“I’m aware that I hate them.”

 

“Not mine,” Sirius responds, with complete confidence. “You always love mine.”

 

He senses rather than sees Remus rolling his eyes, laughs, and tells Remus he might as well turn on the radio since it’s going to be a long drive.

 

“Yes, fine, but to where?”

 

“Put on the radio or I’ll sing,” Sirius threatens.

 

Remus, having already suffered through Sirius’s butchering of carols during the holidays, is quick to take him at his word. He turns the dial and finds, instead of a crackly radio station, a mixed CD Sirius has prepared especially for this trip. It contains all the songs they both liked best from the records they found in Remus’s flat, and whatever tension remaining in Remus melts away when he realizes this. He squeezes Sirius leg, makes a derisive comment about his driving, which Sirius knows full well he means with love, and settles into the ride.

 

It is a long drive indeed; it takes up the better part of the night. Remus offers to drive and Sirius takes him up on it for an hour’s nap, before they switch back again in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant. The greasy smell stays with them for hours, but Sirius figures that’s part of the fun of it. It keeps him awake at any rate, or maybe it’s the caffeine from the near gallon soda he purchased at the restaurant that does that.

 

They pass through the night, Remus falling in and out of sleep, his seat tipped back so he can stretch out his legs. At increasingly distant intervals he blinks opens his eyes, starts awake, and sees the passing flashes of roadway lights drawing out the silhouettes of the night-blackened trees just beyond the road. He glances around, sleepily bewildered, and then, looking to Sirius and seeing him there, sighs, smiles, and relaxes back into sleep.

 

He’s gently snoring when they drive up to their destination, gravel popping softly under the tires, and beneath that a sound that’s softer still: the hush and sigh of the sea.

 

Remus lurches forward the moment the engine dies, hair gorgeously rumpled and his eyes blinking owlishly. “Whassat?” he grumbles, and Sirius laughs.

 

“That, dear professor, is a cottage.”

 

Remus squints into the darkness as Sirius gets out of the car and comes round to open his door. “Bedtime, I think,” says Sirius as he helps Remus to his feet, and Remus, with a series of yawns, agrees as they shuffle into the cottage.

 

It is too dark for Remus to appreciate his present, but the darkness allows them to share another kind of gift: in bed together they murmur sleepy, soft things to each other, a half-formed lullaby made up on the spot. In each other’s arms they fall asleep almost as one, only a minute keeping them separated on either side of sleep.

 

…

 

The morning light comes in and wakes them in the way it does to characters in happy movies: gently, gradually, and with the added flourish of a rooster’s crow. The light coming from the window sheds gold onto Remus’s skin; he wakes just moments before Sirius, who opens his eyes to find him sitting up in bed, his shirt half off his shoulder and a bar of sunlight there instead, lighting him up invitingly. Sirius mumbles something he hopes is sexy and then jolts up, remembering that Remus is just about to see where he’s brought them.

 

The curtains the sunlight is sneaking under are close enough that Remus can open them from his side of the bed without rising, which he does after a quick glance over his shoulder at Sirius. Sunlight falls into the room in full when the curtains part; it has been so gray and dreary these past few months in the city that it seems to Sirius like he is greeting an old friend finally returned from a long journey. Or rather, that he has been the one to go on a long journey purely for this reunion: to feel warmth on his skin, and see all the color returned to the world.

 

When he looks out the window it does rather feel like some dark spell or veil has been lifted to return the world to what it should be. A green lawn rolls down to the sands of a beach, ivory white cliffs rise in the corner of the view, and straight ahead, both sides of the horizon show shades of equally captivating blue, shimmering sea dancing against sky, sky pristine against sea. But it’s something inside the bedroom – which is beautiful in its own cozy, demure way – that gets the little gasp of surprise from Remus Sirius has been waiting for.

 

Propped along the windowsill, and only slightly obscuring the view, is a sketchpad of cream colored paper, and a box of charcoal pencils and colored pens. They are the best money can buy, of course, luxurious even to look at them, and Sirius can see Remus giving them a proper look, the fingers on his drawing hand twitching against the sheets before he finally reaches out to brush his fingertips against them. “Oh,” he says, very softly. “Oh, wow.”

 

And with that Sirius feels the slight tension he’d been holding in his stomach give way. Ever since he’d first asked his uncle if he could borrow this cottage over a month ago he had felt mostly sure that all the elements of this gift would go over well: the warmer air, the view full of things Remus loves to draw, and a nice new set of tools for him to draw with. He had had to check an impulse towards a greater extravagance – Cairo was lovely this time of year – feeling certain that Remus would think that was too much, and that it would create some unpleasantness between them. But his nature had never been one that had brooked much restraint, and so he had been left worrying for weeks that what he had done for Remus’s birthday would not be enough.

 

Now, though, he sees the look on Remus’s face and all uncertainty slips away. His expression is near to awe as he looks again at the view and the sketchpad and pencils and, at last, at Sirius’s face. “Wow,” he says again, and that’s all the invitation Sirius needs to start kissing him. “Happy birthday,” he says after he’s pressed a few quick kisses around his jaw and ear. “And many, many more.” Each word is punctuated by a kiss, Remus’s skin warming beneath his touch.

 

“This is – it’s incredible, Sirius – ah – thank – thank you – no, lower.”

 

Sirius grins, does as asked. “And if you think this is good,” he purrs, sliding a hand beneath Remus’s shirt, as Remus squirms and grins himself, “wait until you see your cake.”

 

…

 

It proves to be a perfect weekend, even better than Sirius had planned. Both days that they’re there the sky stays an immaculate blue from sunup to sundown, after which the stars come out in force and they go outside with mugs of warm cocoa and a blanket wrapped round their shoulders to fill in the gaps in each other’s knowledge of the constellations. Sirius knows all the names and where to look to pick each constellation out of the velvet black, but Remus knows their history, what they meant to the Mayans and the Egyptians, their ancient, broken calculations of the stellar landscape still written into stone, still throwing sharp shadows on solstices and equinoxes, proof of the stately, eternal motions of the cosmos. By day they walk along the cliffs that overlook the sea, Sirius journeying down the smaller ones to retrieve seashells with opalescent curves from the beach while Remus sits on a cliffside bench and draws. It is warm enough that they’re able to shed their coats and walk about in only thick jumpers, but not nearly warm enough to go swimming, and so the beaches are empty and the tide chills around Sirius’s fingers whenever a shell he wants is half-buried in the wet sand on the shore. He wipes his hands on his jeans again and again, lets the sunlight dry the water down to a thin crust of salt.

 

Back up the cliff, he lays down beside the bench Remus has claimed, closing his eyes to let the sunlight sink into him, drifting in and out of a doze, the murmur of the surf and the scratching of Remus’s pencil the purest definition of soothing he knows. He doesn’t even try to look at what Remus is drawing – not that he would ever let him see anything half-finished – though he guesses from how Remus lingered outside the cottage that there might be a study of lilacs on one of the first pages of the sketchbook. And judging from the way the blue pencils have grown so short so quickly he thinks also that there may have been an attempt at the ocean, which from the cliffs ripples out in a variety of diaphanous blues, lush in the way of ocean that has never seen snowfall. When he comes out of his doze he revels in the expression on Remus’s face as he draws: the intentness of his eyes, the furrowing of his brow, the intimation of a smile on one side of his mouth. He has to fight himself to not interrupt him to kiss him, and he does the best he can – for a little while at least.

They take all their meals in the cottage or in a picnic basket; Sirius had arranged for there to be groceries sent in. He cooks things that are difficult for him to prepare in Remus’s small kitchen: an abundantly green salad that needed to be tossed and tossed, a mushroom and gruyere tart, roast chicken with tomato and thyme, and for dinner homemade Bolognese with fresh garlic bread.

 

“Did you take a class?” Remus asks, taking obvious delight in the pasta. “Is that why this is so good?”

 

Sirius laughs, and pours the wine: a Bordeaux, its label missing so Remus won’t know its expense. “Cooking is easy,” he says. “You just follow a recipe.”

 

Remus grunts and Sirius laughs again; he’s aware of Remus’s inability to so much as boil an egg.

 

“It’s just,” Remus goes on, “I suppose I find it strange that you would even be interested in cooking in the first place.”

 

“What, a man can’t be devilishly handsome _and_ know how to cook? Is that too much?”

 

Remus snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “I meant that…well, I thought you’d have someone else do this for you?”

 

“Aha! So I’m too bourgeois to cook my own food, is that it?”

 

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Remus says quickly, seeming embarrassed now to have brought the subject up.

 

Sirius, with a skill he knows he’s inherited from both his parents, decides to skirt neatly around the issue. “I just always thought cooking was fascinating – the chemistry of it, you know, putting in separate, different items to make a new whole – and just kind of fell into it. And as with everything I do it turns out I was good at it so –”

 

“Oh, forget I asked,” Remus grouses.

 

“You’ll be pleased to know,” Sirius says when they have cleaned their plates, “that your cake is from a shop. I haven’t quite mastered the art of baking. Of course that’s because I haven’t yet tried to.”

 

Remus rolls his eyes and then lets them widen as Sirius finally brings out the cake he’s been hyping up all day. It is everything he promised, even as vague as his promises have been – incredible, amazing, the best thing ever baked, he kept saying all day on the beach and the cliffs. It is a chocolate cake, of course, formidably tall, and laced with crenellations of burnt caramel on its top. Between each peak of caramel sits a fat, jewel-toned raspberry, and in the center, in lieu of the usual frosted roses are several ripe figs, meticulously cut to resemble a bouquet.

 

“You’re welcome,” Sirius says before Remus even bites into it, to spare him the delay gratitude would cause. Remus snorts then he sighs over his first bite of cake, his tongue darting out to lick the remaining chocolate from the fork. Sirius half-forgets to have some cake himself, he’s so fixated on watching Remus eat, and so very pleased that he chose this cake so well, this meal so well, this place so well, and was able to give Remus a good birthday.

 

“You were right,” Remus says when he’s gone through his second slice, and Sirius thrills because he hardly ever gets this sort of admission from Remus. “That really was the best thing ever baked.”

 

Sirius practically preens, the sugar from the cake riding high in his blood. Remus leans in close to him, chocolate and caramel on his breath, puts a hand on his knee and murmurs, “How will I ever thank you enough?” His lips twitch as he speaks, clearly stifling a giggle, the sugar getting to him now too.

 

“Gimme the last fig,” Sirius says, his own hands now on Remus’s thighs, caressing, kneading.

 

“Hmmm,” Remus deliberates, eyes going to the cake. “How about we share it?” There’s a glitter in his eyes, a giddiness he doesn’t normally have in him, not even when he’s drunk; how on earth can Sirius refuse him?

 

He takes the fig carefully between his teeth, watches as Remus leans in and begins to nibble on the other side of the fig. It’s silly and sexy until the juice from the fig dribbles all over them, and then it’s just silly, and full of nibbling and sloppy licking and laughing, but that’s lovely too.

 

When the sugar crash comes they’re already in bed, nestled against each other beneath the warm covers. “Thank you,” Remus says then. “This was all really, really wonderful, Sirius. I really…it means a great deal that you did all this for me.”

 

Such effusiveness from Remus is even rarer than hearing him admit that Sirius was right; he lets his eyes fall closed to soak it in, just as he did with the sunlight when he lay on the cliffs.

 

“I love you,” he says, not troubling with the politeness of a “you’re welcome.” He bends to kiss Remus’s face in all its most vulnerable places: on either side of the top of his nose, just shy of his eyes, in the curve beneath his bottom lip, and at his temple, just on top of a small blue vein, his heartbeat soft beneath his lips.

 

“I love you,” he says again, effusive himself now, but Remus is already asleep, his head on Sirius’s chest and a fading smile on his lips.

 

And Sirius, struck suddenly by loneliness, hurries as best he can to follow him.

 

…

 

The drive back is pleasant and uneventful and they share another early dinner in the city before Sirius returns to Grimmauld Place. He would’ve liked to stay at Remus’s flat, but he feels apprehensive about foisting himself on Remus for the fourth day in a row simply because he doesn’t want to go home. Remus likes to have a little privacy; they’ve discussed that much. So they make arrangements for the day after tomorrow and Sirius leaves to return the rental car.

 

He dawdles on the way back home, stopping at a bookshop to leaf through the cookbooks, imagining meals he could prepare on weekends trips they might take in the summer, colorful dishes studded through with fruits that only grow in blistering, tropical heat, drinks stuffed with crushed ice and rum. He skips ahead into the autumn and to the milestones there – their first anniversary, his own birthday – and to the meals they might have then and finds himself growing hungry. He texts James to see if he wants to get something, and buys a few of the cookbooks as he’s waiting for a response. He’s not terribly surprised when James comes back with “can’t, with L!!” but he does feel a bit disappointed. He leaves the bookstore, meanders through a few neighboring shops, and is forced out into the cold as they close one by one.

 

He lingers at every street corner between the shops and Grimmauld Place, missing the stars and Remus’s soft voice near his ear explaining their meaning and history. Above him, clouds and light pollution have combined forces to blot out the cosmos, and he feels lonelier and smaller than he had when confronted with all the stars they saw behind the cottage, the sky like a low ceiling now, hemming him in.

 

He smokes a cigarette on the steps of the house next to his, though Remus would hate it if he knew. Later, he will think about all his delaying and dragged feet and feel that deep down he somehow knew what was waiting for him in the house. He will think about ripples in time, the past and its long reach, legacies you can never disentangle yourself from.

 

When he finally puts out his cigarette and trudges the final few feet to his front door and opens it, everything appears as he should be inside the dim halls of the Place. The air is as thick and heavy as the medieval tapestries on the wall, as it always is, and the night nurse is quiet in her corner of his mother’s room, a paperback romance novel hastily stowed away when Sirius enters, the same author she always seems to read. Kreacher comes in with his obsequious bow, his eyes never quite meeting Sirius’s. He reports to Sirius on the business of the house – his mother’s health, primarily, and also the new paint job in Sirius’s room – and tells Sirius that there’s mail waiting for him in the library.

 

Sirius shrugs off his coat, refuses any food despite his earlier hunger. It’s always been hard for him to eat at home; his throat constricts each time he swallows and nothing has a proper taste. He has no idea how he didn’t starve to death as a boy.

 

He passes by the library, meaning to leave the mail for tomorrow, but sees that there’s a lamp on inside, just beneath the window. He hates when Kreacher does this, partly because it feels like passive nagging to get this or that chore done, but also because he finds it eerie to walk by an empty, darkened room that has one faint lamp lit. There are already ghosts in this house, it does not need to feel any more haunted.

 

He turns the lamp off, picking the mail up with only a glance, then turns the lamp on again. The third letter in the pile has no address, but he knows the slant of that hand. She’s written his name in elaborate calligraphy; Bellatrix always did love her showboating.

 

There’s no letter inside, but he doesn’t expect one. He can tell from the way the envelope feels in his hand that all there is going to be are more photographs.

 

They start from last week and go back in time from there. More dates, more hand-holding, more arm-leaning, more intimacy captured by an unseen interloper, his eyes on them wherever they had gone. It’s disturbing and invasive, but still he only scoffs – until he reaches the final two photographs.

 

The first takes him a minute to understand what he’s seeing. It’s a nighttime shot, only a few filmy beams of light from the streetlamps providing illumination. There are two shapes pressed close together – two bodies – leaning against the wall of an alleyway.

 

That night comes back to him with the force of a punch: the two of them fucking just beyond the restaurant, Remus’s hunger and then his giddiness at his own daring, a little thrill that was meant to stay just between the two of them.

 

It’s obvious what they’re doing, although Remus’s hand, thank God, is blocking both of their cocks from view. But the thought of Bellatrix and Riddle possessing this photograph and what they might do with it has him shaking with rage. He doesn’t believe it beyond Bellatrix to sell him out to some tabloids if she saw any benefit to it, and while he knows that that would be unlikely to injure him personally he can’t imagine the effect it will have on Remus. It might cost him his job at the map shop, and almost certainly his privacy. It might make him leave the city and go back home to his father.

 

Anger and panic flare up within him, making him tremble, but the turmoil of feeling in his chest is extinguished in one gasping breath when he looks at the last photograph.

 

This last image is the only picture in the stack that is a copy, not an original. Sirius knows this because he’s seen it before. He remembers – with a wrench in his gut, as if he’s being violently yanked back to that moment – the stale smoke and coffee smell wafting off of the detectives as they sat before him in the very parlor of this house, a small table between them and the photographs laid out upon it. Objectively speaking there were worse pictures on that table than the one that has been sent to him, but for him the scene those photographs depict has never been objective, and so it is this photograph, rather than the bloodier ones, that hurts him the most.

 

There is a boot lying on a stretch of sand strewn with black pebbles, and wet footprints walking away from the boot, and that is all.

 

That is all, yes, except that the black pebbles glitter with the reflection of a nearby wildfire, and the footsteps are imprinted into the ground in blood, and the boot is – was – Regulus’s. The footsteps are his too; one bloodied, one still booted, uneven, stumbling marks upon the ground.

 

This picture with its extant questions shows the last moment of Regulus’s life that Sirius knows anything about. The footprints lead into the surrounding woods and then vanish, as if into thin air. On that rocky beach was the last time Sirius knew he was alive; everything beyond that moment is blackness.

 

His hand shakes against the photograph, and although he cannot fathom how Bellatrix managed to get a hold of it the cruelty of the act is not unprecedented. She has always been a viper, ever since they were children, and she has always hated him.

 

On the back of the photograph, in the same elegant calligraphy used on the envelope, are four letters written in thin pencil strokes: MMFN. It is a summons, written in the shorthand used exclusively by their families to name the place and time of a meeting, and the sight of it goes through him as surely and sharply as a blade. For years and years he has worked tirelessly to extricate himself from dark pull of his family, and had managed by slow degrees to drag himself closer and closer to being free, but now this. This dark intimation, this elegant cruelty that was etched into his lineage and his truest inheritance.

 

And she knows it, which is perhaps the worst part. She knows that he will be forced to behave as they do, whatever his response to this threat. A Black is most a Black at his blackest, as their crooked little joke goes. Whether in acquiescence or retaliation he would be like them.

 

He slumps into an armchair, dull hatred throbbing behind his eyes like an old, poorly healed wound. And then it hits him all over again that this – his participation in his family’s wickedness – is not the worst part at all, not by a long shot.

 

No, the worst part of this is Remus. He will have to tell Remus.

 

He sits stiff in the chair, the lamp light beside him so low it only adds to the dimness, shadows cleaving to every wall, encircling him, thick in the air as bad memories.

 

It is a long night that follows – every minute a careful torture, and every hour a wrong turn down a long, near endless corridor, narrow as the one beyond the door, and papered over with the same stain-like design. He has always felt constrained by these walls, ever since he was a boy and he was first sat before the tapestry of the family tree, but tonight is something special. Tonight is like the night that Regulus went missing, only longer, lonelier, absent the hope that he’s ever coming back. Tonight he stares down all the hurts of his life, and all the little horrors and all the loss, and makes an account of them.

 

And at the end he finds on the edge of each bad memory and heartache a mistake of his own making, and thinks that it would be no lie to call them black.

 

…

 

The past comes to him in scattershot impressions of color and noise, a barrage of his own history. There is no orderly progression from birth to his current age; the past comes to him out of order, writhing like a living thing as it jumps back and forth in the inherently tangled way of memory.

Dust motes floating in a sunbeam; his parents’ voices coming up through the wall and the floor respectively, rarely in the same place outside of mealtimes, never, ever touching. Her, yelling at a maid or nanny or governess; him, on the phone, with one of his business partners or his mistresses. Two worlds, a floor apart, and the motes spinning in the sunlight above Sirius’s bed, his fingers pink at the tips as he reaches into the light, trying to touch them, trying to touch anything. An awareness in the back of his skull burning like the beginning of a headache: he should love his parents, but he doesn’t.

 

His first day at primary school, his nanny leading him to the playground, her arms held in front of her, no hand holding allowed, it’ll make the boy soft, it’ll make the boy dependent, never mind that the boy is only six years old. He’d stopped grabbing for their hands at four; never say he wasn’t a quick study. But the playground at school is a shock, because he’d always understood that this was the way it was for everyone: no touching, no shouting, get your filthy shoes off my clean carpet, don’t even look at that a sharp glance might break it, don’t you know how much that’s worth, more than you, I’ll tell you that.

 

This is not how things are for everyone. For the others on the playground there is screaming, squawking, laughing, running with arms spread out like they’re about to take flight. There are mothers, and a few fathers, fussing with small coats, brushing hair out of eyes, hands everywhere pinching, caressing, hugging, loving. He looks away at the kisses; a childhood spent round adults having given him an adult’s sense of shame. It’s indecent; it’s indecent how much he wants it, the contact, the kissing, the love.

 

Hungry nights after decadent dinners; hunger touching everything. Awake at midnight, creeping down to the kitchen, the pallid light leaking from the refrigerator, the burners blazing blue on the stove, the egg cracking against the bowl, spun round with a spoon and then poured into the pan, the heat doing its work, changing its color, turning it solid, a broken thing made whole. He would eat it with his fingers, leave the kitchen spotless, watch the cook’s confusion the next morning, her furrowed brow over the missing egg. He made an understanding with her when he wanted to move on to more complicated dishes, charmed her into handwriting her recipes, and in the dead of night prepared his own solitary banquets, lit the candles, poured water in a wineglass and mimicked the way his parents drank. In bed by dawn and somehow, still, not satiated.

 

And then the rare nights, shadow in the door, exception to the rule, no this way, Sirius, this way, my son. Her hand on his, the strength of it, the knife cutting, the conversation that was recitation, prove to me you learned this. Gone at dawn, these instances like mirages in the desert, illusions of a person who wasn’t really there. The almost smile, the almost oasis, the almost mother he would never have.

 

Galas and soirees and teas and dinner parties, fundraising events for charities that didn’t really need the money, crystal goblets, insides smeared red, muted clinking against the tablecloth. The family together, and the family friends. All the same: space between them, wives getting air kisses from the other wives, their fingers and necks studded with jewelry the husbands used to stand in for true matrimonial affection, the men off to the side, their low jokes, racist and sexist and classicist vitriol augmented by French and twelve letter words, the children in their miniature suits and dresses, quiet and ever anticipating a reprimand, still but for their eyes which flew to all corners of the room, and no touching, no touching, no touching. You could get away with a kick beneath the table if you aimed it right – no one cried for Mummy, Mummy didn’t care, Mummy didn’t exist, only Mother did, and Mother had far more important things to deal with than your whining – and so this was the only contact. Jamming the toes of tiny dress shoes into knees, quick hair pulls, sharp elbows, and a hundred other small acts of violence. Bellatrix palming hair pins, stabbing them into his side when she passed, poking holes through his clothes his mother would rage at later, why can’t you ever be careful, you little wretch? Bellatrix’s eager smile across the room; she knew what she was doing, of course she knew.

 

The china plates lined up within the hutch: don’t touch. The antique silver: don’t touch. The family portraits on the wall: don’t touch. Her jewels, his cuff links: don’t touch. The crystal and the wine and the aged brandy in its decanter: don’t touch. Her gowns, his suits: don’t touch. The ottoman in the library, the sword mounted on the wall, the tapestry with their lineage: don’t touch. The delicate linens and the Tiffany lamp: don’t touch. Her hands, her arms, her cheeks: don’t touch, don’t touch, don’t touch. His hands: don’t touch – unless.

 

Unless it’s one of those nights, lightning out of the blue, tie undone, angry at nothing, angry at everything, glass against the wall, his own helpless bad timing, and the hands come down on him, and there’s contact then, but not at all what he wanted.

 

In the morning the bruises blooming beneath his skin in ugly, rotted colors, mesmerizing in the hazy sunlight at dawn. What grows from this? This bloodied soil that’s never nourished? What can he become, but more of the same? His father’s son, his mother’s son: don’t touch – unless.

 

The mausoleum: his first memory. His grandfather’s funeral, the cavernous darkness inside the marble walls, the shadows pooling into the empty slots in the wall. Counts them out from where his grandfather is laid, finds his slot, looks around, sees the words written on the wall: _Tonjours Pur_. Always pure. _Pure_ is too murky for his boyish mind to grasp, but _always_ he knows. Always means forever.

 

Forever with these people, in this darkness, trapped.

 

Panic at the edge of every thought, always awake to this feeling. Before dawn, at four am, two am, all the long, wandering hours of the deep night, trying to plan an escape, desperation creeping in, and thinking, I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

 

But there is longing too, embedded in the hate, can’t dig it out no matter how hard he tries. That’s the most difficult part, really. The moments of levity, the occasional alliances. Andromeda’s sly glance across the room as Bellatrix, in a huff, searches for the gloves they stole from her. Narcissa, always good for a cigarette, the oddly comfortable quiet as they blew smoke out the bathroom window. Uncle Alphard’s rare appearances, his alien good cheer and easy smile, as out of place as a bird of the tropics in Antarctica.  Lucius, for ten minutes, on his second wine as the buzz was kicking in, his self-satisfaction melting into charm, his eyes glittering.

 

And Regulus.

 

Dust motes floating in the overbearing florescent lights; the understanding that he was being watched from the other side of the mirror, the two detectives seated across from him, the scarred metal table between them, and the photographs.

 

He can’t explain this to them. What he understands of it, they wouldn’t get. Working class, that disreputable breed his mother always warned him against. People with no real history.

 

It’s bollocks. He knows it, but still there is the weight of legacy, the imprisoned feeling that comes from living in a house your great-great-great-great grandparents built. _Had_ built, rather, with a crew they almost certainly underpaid. You can understand money the way his mother does – the old and the good, or the despicable nouveau riche – or you can understand it the way he does in that wealth that passes through generations, like all things inherited, comes to you bloody. It shields and it stains you, and yes, it corrupts absolutely.

 

Bad enough to be in this family with its neglect and its abuse. Couple this with the money, and dysfunction melds into corruption, and in the center of that Venn diagram you get the clearest picture of a Black.

 

Wealth like this: Nazi gold, blood diamonds, deeds to oil fields in countries with authoritarian regimes, politicians in one pocket, journalists in another. And then the smaller, more intimate crimes. The DWIs erased from the records, the purchased educations, the mistresses hidden just out of view. The domestic disputes. But the important thing, you know, is that they never leave any mess. The blood stains bleached from the rug overnight, no sign of them the next morning, spotless as the kitchen after Sirius leaves it, quiet as the inside of their mausoleum.

 

What do you do with a family like this? How can you bear it?

 

There is only one way: you have to find a second family.

 

First day of boarding school, on the precipice of a rebellious streak that would carry him through the next decade, the manicured lawns, the austere buildings, the world as neatly arranged as it had always been.

 

And then a shout from within his dormitory room, a boy with wild hair and crooked glasses appearing at the open door. Static shock when they shook hands, a smile on his face he couldn’t seem to shake. Midnight that night, awake together, not lonely for the first time in years, sneaking across the grounds, ducking beneath the windows, minutes away from being caught and already best friends.

 

James, and the Potters: Sirius’s lucky break. He saw with them the way a family could be, the way love could be. James was the brother he had never had.

 

But what about Regulus? Where was Regulus in all this?

 

The detectives sitting across from him, the implicit accusation in their eyes, their tone, their posture. Everyone at school described Sirius and James as brothers; the love between them was apparent, the way love should be. They hugged, they laughed, they fought, they made up, they shared secrets. It was easy with James. With Regulus it was different. Complicated.

 

He was always in the periphery, that was one part of it. In the corner at parties, ducking under the sofa when their father hit the drink, in his room with the door barely cracked, out of sight and out of mind. Their parents almost left him behind on holidays or other people’s houses a few times. Their father only struck him once; their mother rarely critiqued him. He was at his most visible when Sirius came home with demerit slips or had disappointed them in some way. They’d invoke his name then and only then, their mother would call him her better son, their father would point in his direction accusingly, but then the row would die down and they’d forget Regulus’s spotless attendance record, his straight As, his perfectly acceptable friends, and he would fade back again into the corner of the eye.

 

Although, he never entirely faded to Sirius.

 

Dust motes floating in the hazy light of the attic; Regulus beside him, a joint going back and forth between them, the window open and the smoke blown out it in quick, secretive puffs. They could never talk without fighting – Regulus too caustic and contradictory, Sirius too quick with a barb, too much, he feared, like their mother – so they never talked, and the silences were always uneasy. They were enemies turned allies in the attic, the ceasefire on so long as they smoked, but the double cross always imminent. They had things the other wanted; their main point of dispute was that they saw the other as the lucky one. They could make things worse for each other and did, but there were lines, understandings. Like spies they slipped signals to each other when their father edged near a rage, and birthdays were as respected as the attic in terms of ceasefires.

 

But the main thing they did for each other was to cover the other’s escapes.

 

Say I’m at the library, say I went to James’, say I stayed late at football practice, say I was volunteering at the animal shelter, say I joined the astronomy club, say I stayed late to do extra credit, say I was here, say I was there. No follow-up questions and no hounding for answers, although there was, occasionally, some bribing. Because as distant as they kept each other, and as few proper conversations as they shared, they still kept tabs on what the other was doing when they were out of the house, and certain activities cost more to protect than others. They traded in weekends sometimes – I know you’re going here this weekend, so you’re going to cover me the next – but drugs were their principle currency.

 

They were wild in different ways, drawn to different vices. For all his rumored degeneracy Sirius was the tamer of the two of them: weed for lazy weekends with James, cigarettes to get him through the boredom of his homework. And he drank, of course, downing beer at concerts, slammed up against a prospective girl or boy in the mosh pit, hungry hands and mouth, always hungry, burgers with James near dawn, ducking into a newsagent’s to buy mints to cover their breaths, at the Potters’ for a second breakfast, hungover as hell but doing a decent job of hiding it, and then back to Grimmauld Place, bag of cocaine down the front of his trousers, slipped into the drop point they’d chosen at the advent of their teens, the umbrella stand in the back of the hall closet, a place the maids rarely cleaned.

 

The next weekend, Regulus’s turn, the coke lined up on the bathroom sink, traces of it still there on Sundays when he came back, mud crusted onto his shoes, scent of campfire in his hair, eyes bloodshot, ink on his fingertips. Rosier’s family owned a swath of pristine woodland, perfect for a teenage bacchanalia, though all Sirius had ever heard from Regulus was that the stars were really something up there. They were so clear and distinct he could count them, or felt he could when he was high. It made Sirius sad to think of Regulus on the edge of his friend’s parties, staring up at the sky while the others made out and got drunk, as alone as he ever was in the house.

 

But sympathy was weakness in Grimmauld Place, and he never said a thing, never extended a hand, never reached out, no touching, no touching, no touching.

 

But you knew where he was? That searing fluorescent light, the two detectives, the photographs and their attendant crimes.

 

I thought I knew, he tells them, a lie that’s almost true. The full truth would be this: I wanted to think I knew.

 

The turn: Sirius, seventeen, his rebellion in full swing. I won’t be like you, he promises and threatens his parents. Never like you. No more deals with Regulus, his delinquency in full view. Stumbles in still drunk, enjoys the yelling, wants them to suffer like he always did. He takes pride in the kind of drunk he is – sloppy, mean, and incapable of seriousness, but never violent. All his parents’ energies go into corralling him, and Regulus, as it seems was always his destiny, completely disappears.

 

Pentagrams. Tattoo ink. An odd drawing on the wall: a skull with a snake for a tongue, perverse. Books missing from the library at school – occult histories, blood rites – and all the professors on alert. Sirius finds them in the attic, beneath the cigar box they keep the weed in, stares at the covers and barely absorbs their titles. Sets them aside, asks no questions. Worries, can’t help it, but it’s a worry without articulation. They live in this house together, they share this blood, but they don’t have what he has with James: the feeling of ownership and responsibility love brings, the way James will take him by the collar, give him a shake and say, What are you doing? Get your head straight, I can’t stand to see you this way. Shaking Regulus this way would be like shaking a doll, nothing would come out, nothing would change.

 

Or so he tells himself. He’ll never know either way.

 

Whole days go by and no one says Regulus’s name. Even Kreacher, who had a clumsy affection for him, keeps his eyes trained on Sirius. Sirius, for his own part, can’t help his own antics. Can’t keep his voice down, can’t behave, can’t stop throwing things against the walls, can’t stop burning his own clothes or family antiques just to hear them raging. He believes he’s out past the point where they can do anything to him: his mother’s hatefulness is only so much noise, and his father has wizened as he himself has grown, Sirius could catch his punches now if he had the nerve to throw them. He believes he’s invincible, like every other seventeen-year-old, and for the first time in his life he is not looking at Regulus.

 

He graduates with honors, plans to take a gap year, borrows money from Alphard to see Italy and Greece. He and James drink wine on the beach in Sorrento, he sits in sun-scorched fields and draws studies of ancient ruins, he flirts in Italian on cobbled street corners, and he and James try every flavor of gelato their stomachs can handle. He sends blithe postcards back to favorite professors and Alphard, and even one to Regulus, a kitschy sketch of Mt Vesuvius. _Wish you weren’t not here!_ he writes, an old joke. He sips his cappuccinos with relish, downs his grappa without wincing, and watches the sea out the window grow bluer and bluer. He and James make it to their hotel in Brindsi, the ferry docks a fifteen minute walk away, but they sleep only one night there and never make it to Greece.

 

“I was in the bathroom. I heard a noise. It sounded like a gunshot, but I didn’t think that could be. How could that be? I thought maybe the television was up too loud, so I didn’t even bother to go downstairs. I just went straight back to bed.”

 

That’s what he told you? the detectives asked.

 

Yes, that was what Regulus told Sirius, and yes, he believed him. The official reports still back this up, they never could find any sign of wrongdoing. No fingerprints on the pistol but Sirius’s father’s, no sign of anyone interfering with the scene. It was only that the angle at which Mr. Black shot himself could also have been managed by a second party. And the lack of a suicide note was something else the detectives found troubling, but Sirius, who had inherited his impulsiveness from his father, knew that that didn’t really mean anything.

 

Their mother found him, and didn’t bother to wake Regulus or call for Sirius until the next morning. They put him in the mausoleum with the rest of their family, and Mrs. Black had the room he died in redecorated the next day.

 

Visions: the bones of Regulus’s wrist showing their shape through his skin, the bones of his fingers and ankles seeming so delicate, breakable. He was so thin. Shadows beneath his eyes, gaze at the horizon, and always around him the scent of campfire, of burning.

 

There was a window, where the dynamic in the house was newly shifted, the lightning out of the blue forever forestalled, where they could have tried to mend things, where they could have tried to be brothers. But before Sirius even realized that this was a possibility, the chance was gone. He saw his mother, standing at the threshold of the room his father had died in, staring uncomprehendingly at the new furniture, and he knew that something was wrong with her. He found the prescription bottles she’d hidden, the calls from doctors she’d let go to voicemail, understood that she was growing ill, and with her full in his view, Regulus was out of sight again, and gone.

 

“So you had no idea what he was getting up to during this time?”

 

“How could I? He was never around and I was dealing with all these doctor visits and trying to find nurses my mother would tolerate. And then I was delaying university for another semester as well. There was a lot on my plate. How could I know?”

 

How could he not? The cocaine, the edginess, those books in the attic, the way he was always going off with Rosier and Mulciber. But it was like something sitting in the corner of his eye, easy to ignore, easy to pretend it wasn’t really there. And he thought: I don’t like all those drugs, and I don’t like his friends, and it’s creepy the way he stole those books and tore out their pages, but so what? He’s seventeen, our father just died, it’s just a phase. So he allowed it to blur, fade from view, the way they had always done with Regulus.

 

What grows from this? From the shadows of a person who is never truly seen? What did he do with all those dark, lonely hours, when he was in a crowded room but no eyes were on him? He understood what Sirius did, that they only way out was to find a second family, but he had never had Sirius’s luck and the people in his found family were no better than his true one.

 

Or maybe luck had had nothing to do with it. Maybe this was what Regulus had wanted.

 

Horrible thoughts: the things he found beneath the floorboards of the attic. Regulus’s sketchbook. Regulus’s drawings. Drowned animals, knives dripping blood, a man alone in a room having a conversation with himself, a woman’s lace stocking tied around a severed arm, studies in blackness. He could admire their technique if he didn’t feel repulsed by them, and if he didn’t think they were a sign he should have heeded.

 

“You had no idea what he was doing, where he was going.” The detectives, their flat voices, their flat stares. Sirius looking up at the fluorescents to see a fly decaying against the bulb, anything to avoid the photographs they’d laid before him. One detective sighing to the other, and then a whispered exchange.

 

“Mr. Black? Tell us again about the night of the fifth. Where was your brother?”

 

Say I was here.

 

Muddy footprints in the hall, scrapes on his hand. Where were you? Sirius asked.

 

Just say I was here.

 

Obfuscations: lying without lying. “I can’t tell you with any certainty where he was. It’s a big house, you’ve seen it. We go for days without seeing each other sometimes and then I’ll find that he’s been binge-watching some nonsense in his room for half a week. I can tell you he was there in the morning. I know I heard his shower running.”

 

They frowned over his non-answer, their eyes seemed to say, why bother with all this? Even with as little as he’d said he’d made his relationship with Regulus clear: they were distant and disinterested in one another’s lives. They resented each other, were out to get each other, and were somehow always competing. Why bother to protect him, when Sirius had his own airtight alibi – phone records of a call made to James, coupled with a lengthy conversation with his mother’s night nurse – and the evidence against Regulus was so cut and dry. Why bother? Why not absolve himself of Regulus and Regulus’s crimes?

 

Because of the stormy nights when they were boys when the door to Sirius’s room would creak open and Regulus would linger, for an instant, at the threshold, waiting as Sirius pulled back the covers to let him in so they could huddle together and feel bigger than the storm. Because of the way they could talk sometimes, just with their eyes, and be able, on very rare occasions, to make each other laugh. Because of the dust motes spinning in the sunbeam, the way Regulus would lay beside him and stretch his hand up to the sunlight too. Because of the lazy summer days during their school years when they taught each other to draw, adjusting each other’s lines, trading off their skills with each other. Because of the last good moment he had with Regulus, just this way: drawing alone in the dining room and then looking up to see that Regulus had entered and that he was drawing too. He drew him, before they lost the light, and he’ll always be grateful he did; there are no pictures of Regulus where he is not frowning or looking highly uncomfortable to be made to stand before the lens, but there is this drawing, done in thick, forgiving lines, of him loose-limbed, at ease, and almost smiling.

 

So it is for this drawing that he tried to protect him, so, so belatedly, from the police. And because, of course, he loved him.

 

But his love was not enough. Like a fist it only bruised him, like cruel words it had barbs that cut too deep. They came to the door on the morning of the sixth, asked if he would come to the police station with them, and then they took out the photographs and showed him what his brother had done.

 

With Rosier and Mulciber and a few others of his grody little friends he had created a cult, or a gang. The terminology was never clear, but it was a dark, messy thing, full of strange rituals and the trading of ugly secrets. They had started small – graffiti, shoplifting – and then things had escalated. Grave robberies and horrific things done to stray cats; ritual beatings and a whole lot of drugs. There was an insistence on proving yourself to the group, showcasing your loyalty through bloody acts of violence. The detectives confirmed that this was Rosier’s motivation when he cornered and mutilated his young stepsister, but the other crimes set during this time were murkier, more difficult to pin down. What they knew for a fact was that Mr. Black had died during this time period. Again, the angle of the gunshot; again, the absence of the suicide note. But this was not why Sirius was asked in. This was not the final crime Regulus was accused of.

 

There was a kidnapping. A lonely boy from Regulus’s year, lured out on the pretext of a drink. The pictures of what they did from there are forever seared into Sirius’s brain; he imagines the detectives showed him hoping the shock would loosen the truth from him, but he had never dreamed that Regulus was capable of this kind of thing. He had always thought he was keeping tabs on him, but not, quite apparently, closely enough.

 

He takes thin comfort in the fact that Regulus appears in none of the photographs they set before him, but the comfort ends at the framing of the shots: he can sense Regulus behind the camera’s lens, the layout of each picture as adroit and exacting as his own drawings.

 

The kidnapping lasted a total of thirteen hours, and ended abruptly in the Rosier family’s woodland property. They had been driving over the rocky roads, along a ravine, when the boy made a final bid for freedom. He launched himself from the backseat to the wheel and the car went over and onto the rocky shores of a shallow lake.

 

Three dead on contact, one dead en route to the hospital, and one missing.

 

Regulus’s bloody footprint, and his mangled boot. No sign of his body, no evidence of him contacting anyone or drawing any money from his accounts. Just the footprints into the trees and then – gone.

 

They are interrupted mid-interview by one of Sirius’s uncles who works in the upper echelons of the justice department, Walden Macnair. The fluorescents flicker when he barges in, the dead fly shudders and falls to the table. “The hell do you think you’re doing? Don’t you know who this is?” Macnair asks the detectives. And then the family lawyers come in, and the hush money goes round, and Regulus is demoted from suspect to person of interest, and then, when the media takes hold of the story, from person of interest to boy swept along in the tide.

 

“You should’ve called me sooner,” Macnair says, though Sirius had never called him at all. He clapped him on the shoulder, and seemed to expect thanks, and Sirius gave it to him out of reflex. He couldn’t imagine trying to explain what it was like to have things end like this, with no witnesses having seen Regulus stumbling along the road not far from the crash, with no money pulled from any of the family’s accounts, with no body found in the woods, with no hint whatsoever what had become of his little brother.

 

And if there were no hints, no leads to track down, no way to know if he was living or dead, if he would ever see him again, then there was also no prayer of ever knowing _why_. Why this despicable obsession? Why this terrible crime? Why didn’t you just come to me before this got out of hand? Why couldn’t you just once let us be brothers?

 

Why didn’t I see? Why didn’t I know?

 

But he did see, and if he didn’t know the details he still knew that something was wrong. He had seen the sketchbook – had hidden it, in fact, from the police when they came to the house searching for evidence – and had watched the depravity in it grow and grow. He had seen the last picture Regulus had drawn and it had left chills in him for days.

It was their family’s mausoleum, outlined in ecstatic, frantic strokes, lending the whole building a tilted appearance, like it had been built on ground that was now sinking into itself. It was drawn as if shadowed by the sun, fairly vibrating with darkness, making it more real to Sirius than the actual building itself. Regulus had managed, somehow, to draw it the way that Sirius had always felt about their family: a claustrophobic and corrupting place, wretched to its core. And he had, in fact, drawn the core: a little slice of the mausoleum’s interior was laid bare on the corner of the page, three inches worth of space showing the row that their father and grandfather’s coffins were in. Was it delight that shook the lines on the coffins? The pleasure of having been seen at last? Or was it shame, the way Sirius had felt shame when he’d learned his father had died, a discomfiting void where his grief should’ve been, but only that? Impossible to know for sure, like everything else at the end of Regulus’s life. But there was this, a single thing added to the coffins, that did not exist on them in real life. Two words rendered in cursive, an admission no matter how you looked at it: _Tonjours Pur_.

 

Always pure. Always a Black. No point in trying to escape it. Because it’s in him, all these things that Regulus did, that his mother did, that his father did. They are his legacy and his inheritance, and as good a prophecy for his life as he will ever receive. They are in the seams of his bones; they are his blood. And he would do well to remember than blood will out.

 

He puts the sketchbook away; he’d taken it out following Bellatrix’s message, needing to see it, needing to remember what he was a part of. He used to take it out weekly, to look over those quiet little horrors, the proof of what his brother is or had been, but time likes to play its funny tricks. It likes to lull you sometimes, take you out and away from your past like a tide, bearing you into new circumstances and new people, letting what had happened to you disappear behind you like a shoreline. So he’d gone to university and he’d taken his classes and he’d begun to eat lunch every day at a certain café, and he’d started to see a certain young man, and for the first time in ages he’d felt the itch for the pen and drawing paper, for the first time he’d felt like himself again. And then he had started to speak to him, to laugh with him, to kiss him, to hold him, to love him, and now he was not just himself, but a new self, a self with secret wings.

 

But the tide of time goes in as well as out, pushing you back to that jagged shoreline again, where it is only inevitable that you dash yourself against those rocks and tear yourself once more to pieces. Only now it is worse, because of Remus. Because now that he’s with Remus, Remus could get hurt by all this too.

 

Could? What denial. _Will be_.  As soon as he finds out about the pictures that were taken of them in the alley it will sour things between them, if it doesn’t ruin them out right. And if that doesn’t do it it’s only a time before he finds out the rest of it, the whole ugly history of the Black clan. And then Remus will do what any sane person would when they discover their partner’s family is wholeheartedly depraved and despicable, and he’ll break up with him.

 

Sirius sits back in the chair, the sketchbook safely stowed away, the photographs beside him, dimly illuminated by that one lamp, shadows deep on everything. And though the dawn is coming and he knows that he will have to face these things he still sits here, the walls tight, the air tight, his skin tight, and feels hopelessly trapped.

 

…

 

He sends money to Bellatrix at the time and date she named for the meeting instead of going. He can’t figure there’s anything else he can do, and knows that she and Riddle will only extort him for more, so he starts with a fairly low amount and waits for her next volley.

 

His mother’s day nurse has new shoes, or else she’s just switched from boots to sneakers due to the warming weather, and now he can only hear her when she’s just outside his room passing down the hall. He marks her comings and goings from his bed, figures she must have a bladder infection from how often she’s visiting the bathroom. He stares at the wall in the silence between her bathroom breaks, realizes the yellow he’s had the room repainted looks like scrambled eggs. He hates scrambled eggs. But he can’t manage to lift his head to call for Kreacher to have the room repainted.

 

He’s avoided calls for days, and sent out only the vaguest texts. He parcels out only “lols” to James, and they do their usual work of grinding conversation to a halt. To Remus he sends out only excuses – sickness, tiredness from the sickness, a rebounding of the sickness – and hears from him less and less.

 

There is a weight on his chest that he just can’t shake, no matter how hard he tries to even out his breathing. He misses a week of school and then rises from bed to realize he’s missed absolutely nothing because the previous week was the spring holiday. He remembers he’d promised Remus they’d go to a host of museums, maybe even the theatre, when he was off for that holiday. Add yet another regret to the pile.

 

He returns to the university and feels like he’s coming off a bender despite the fact that he hasn’t drank anything more than water since receiving Bellatrix’s message. He’s barely set foot on campus before he’s accosted by James.

 

“So,” James says, as he claps an arm on his shoulder and steers him towards the science building, “are you deliberately sabotaging your relationship or is this an overblown attempt to make me apologize for calling you soppy?”

 

“What? Why do you say that?”

 

James stops walking. “Really?”

 

Sirius bites the cuticle of his left thumb, and cannot meet James’s eyes.

 

“Do you know he called me yesterday? Wanted to know if you’d said anything to me about him. If he’d done something wrong.”

 

“Oh, _fuck_.” Sirius runs a hand through his hair, and looks in the direction of the café as if he’ll see Remus there.

 

“What are you doing here, Sirius? Why are you fucking this up? You love him – God knows I’ve had to hear about that often enough – and he’s perfect for you. He calls you out on all your shit – except this shit apparently – and he’s smart and you both read the same flowery nonsense –”

 

“He doesn’t know anything,” Sirius says in a rush. He tears away at his cuticle, drawing blood, and finally meets James’s gaze. “He doesn’t know about my family.”

 

“Ah,” James says, his annoyance dissipating some. “Well, I mean he’s seen the house, mate. I’m sure he has some idea. Probably he’s looked you up as well.”

 

“He doesn’t have a computer,” Sirius says, groaning. “Doesn’t like them. Has no bloody idea about any of it.”

 

“Well…it might be time. You know, to tell him.”

 

Sirius looks at him sourly. “Oh, right, sure. How should I say it? Maybe, oh, hey, Remus, do you know how to bribe police and judges to cover up kidnapping and murder? Because I do! Ooh, and also, just so you know, I’m basically a ticking time bomb of mental unwellness.”

 

“Unwellness isn’t a word.”

 

“Oh, shut up, Potter.”

 

“No, I mean that’s what he’s going to say. That’s going to be his biggest negative reaction, I guarantee it. Such a nitpicker, that one. I love that he speaks French better than you and meanwhile you’ve been holidaying there since before you could walk. Remind me again why he doesn’t go to our school? I’d kill to see him take Snape down a peg during debates.”

 

“Money,” Sirius says sharply. “He hasn’t got any. Which, you know, is another thing I’ve been tip-toeing around.”

 

“Don’t think the fact that you’re rich is going to be as much of a surprise. Considering, well, everything about you.”

 

Sirius rolls his eyes but doesn’t feel he can deny it; he is, after all, wearing a custom made leather jacket he had sent to him from Tuscany.

 

“Listen, just…just don’t bollocks things up with him by giving him the silent treatment,” James says. “He deserves to know why you’ve been AWOL. You don’t have to give it to him all at once, just let him know that it’s not him. Because he thinks it’s him.”

 

Sirius groans again, runs a hand through his hair. They’re nearly to class and as the door to the science building slams shut behind them Sirius whispers, “It’s so much to ask of someone.” In that moment he’s not sure if he means that it’s too much to ask of Remus to accept the horror story that is his family, or if it’s too much to ask of him to tell it.

 

But then James, eyes ever fixed on the prize, says, “He loves you. It won’t matter to him,” and Sirius feels something within him give way.

 

At the end of the hall is Lily, waiting with her books pressed to her chest, for James. She beams when she sees him and when they embrace Sirius feels the weight of the last few days without Remus anew. He forces himself into the classroom and begins to plan how he’ll make it up to him and, more terrifyingly, how he’ll explain.

 

…

 

“I’m sorry,” he says, first thing, when Remus turns after locking up the map shop he works at. Remus startles, gripping his cane tightly, and exhales a soft “oh” that condenses out of his mouth in a perfect circle. His cheeks are red even though he’s only been standing in the cold for half a minute. Sirius, for his part, is absolutely freezing – only a threadbare t-shirt on beneath his jacket, his collarbone exposed, his jeans ripped along the thigh – but it’s worth it for the look that’s come on to Remus’s face. He had made a crucial mistake in the first days of their relationship, admitting to fantasies of Sirius in leather on his bike, and Sirius had laughed, said nothing more, and stored that piece of information away for spring or for apology-making. He’s leaning against the motorbike now, legs splayed, head tilted back, nothing apologetic whatsoever in his posture, nothing about the arrangement of his limbs that doesn’t scream _look at me, want me, fuck me_.

 

“You…” Remus starts, and then through the growing redness in his cheeks and the hunger in his eyes he says, “You’re trying to make me forget you haven’t called me in days.”

 

“Am I?” Sirius purrs, letting his t-shirt ride up on his stomach so it shows skin. He smiles but then can’t keep the smile on his face as he sees that Remus’s eyes are a little red too.

 

“I thought…I thought at first maybe something was really wrong. And when James said nothing was wrong I thought maybe you were trying to get back at me somehow. For when I wouldn’t speak to you right before we started dating. But then I –”

 

Sirius pushes himself off the bike, cuts Remus off with a kiss, can no longer stand to see him blame himself. “I’m sorry,” he says again, this time a whisper, right into Remus’s neck. “It wasn’t about you. It could never be about you.”

 

Remus pushes him back slightly, putting space between them. “Then what is it about, Sirius?”

 

Remus is looking at him the way he’s always looked at him, the way he looked at him in all the photographs: with absolute, unwavering attention. And as Sirius aches over having missed being the focus of Remus’s gaze for so many days he realizes exactly what he can do to ease Remus into an explanation of his family. The idea comes to him like all his ideas do, like a piece of rope dropped abruptly in front of his vision and which he will pull on and climb without knowing precisely what it’s tied to or where it will lead him.

 

“Come on,” he says, already lost in the tug of the inevitable, barely aware that he could turn this idea aside.

 

“What?” Remus says, now growing visibly irritated. “What – what are you doing?”

 

Sirius had pulled his spare helmet from below the seat and is now handing it to Remus, who looks as perplexed as if Sirius had thrust an alien artifact into his hands.

 

“We have to take a ride before I can explain,” he says matter-of-factly.

 

“You can’t expect me to –”

 

“Oh come now, like you’ve got a problem with straddling,” he says cheekily, rolling his hips suggestively as he mounts the motorbike.

 

Remus’s frown is so stern that Sirius feels it ought to append the dictionary definition of the word. Before he can hear just how irritated he’s made Remus he heads him off, saying, “Listen, I know I’ve been an arse the past few days. I’m sorry, I really am. Hand to my heart, Remus, it was not about you. I swear. I’m going to try to explain, but I need time. Say, ten minutes so we can get to where we’re going?”

 

Remus’s response, though annoyed, is contained to three words, “It’s _freezing_ , Sirius.” He crosses his arms and gives Sirius’s bike a look that makes Sirius feel offended on the bike’s behalf. But seeing as he has been mucking things up between them lately, he decides to overlook it, takes the helmet back from Remus, and calls a cab.

 

Remus is silent during the ride, a fact made more pronounced by the cabbie’s chatter. He stares out the window as Sirius makes small talk and Sirius stares at him and in this way they are both among the first in the city to see the snowfall starting. The cabbie curses when he notices, complains about how late in the season it is for snow and how bad the other drivers on the road will behave, and Remus presses the back of his hand to the window and murmurs, “My mother loved snow.” Sirius, to his surprise, finds that he can truthfully say, “Mine too,” and these two simple words make Remus look at him for the first time the entire ride, which also happens to be the moment the cabbie hits the breaks and announces, “Here we are. The Noble House.”

 

Sirius takes his time paying the cabbie so that Remus will not feel obligated to rush out of the taxi and possibly hurt his leg. He’s standing with his arms crossed again when Sirius joins him on the sidewalk and without looking at him he says flatly, “You’ve brought me to a hotel.”

 

“Yes,” Sirius says as he leads the way inside, where he feels Remus stiffen next to him before he says, “I’ll correct myself. You’ve brought me to an _expensive_ hotel.”

 

It’s impossible to deny this. The lobby alone is too sumptuous to hide the fact that you either need to scrimp and save or have an excessive annual salary to spend the night here. A long art deco style hallway, lined with potted plants that shimmer slightly in the illumination cast from the chandeliers dangling above them, leads to a glass ceiling atrium, where there are high, leather-back chairs, a tremendous fireplace, and a floral centerpiece so large and colorful it looks like something brought to life from an animated film. The check-in counter, which sits opposite the fantastical flower arrangement, is made of a wood the color of espresso and contains carvings of a hunting scene. This motif continues on the wall behind the desk, where there is a painting depicting regal ladies stiffly seated beneath a tree on a hill, forever awaiting the men and dogs who stood just below, preparing to join them.

 

“Sirius,” Remus sighs, when they reach the check in desk and Sirius has handed over his credit card to the desk agent. The agent glances at the card and then discreetly steps away from the counter. “I know you said you were going to explain, but this is starting to feel an awful lot like you trying to make me forget again. I mean this place is…”

 

“Excessive,” Sirius agrees. “Believe me, I know. The presidential suite is pretty nice though.”

 

“Right, well –”

 

“Second from the right, do you see her?” Sirius says, pointing at the painting of the hunting party behind the counter. “That’s my Aunt Elladora. She’s the only one of them I’ve met. Nasty woman. Lived to be a hundred and fifteen, and probably did it surviving solely on spite.”

 

Remus glances at the painting and then Sirius, and then back to the painting again. “Are you having me on?” he asks.

 

Sirius sighs. “Listen, Remus –”

 

“Mr. Black!” interrupts a man in a trim suit. His air of self-importance and the obsequious bow he makes in Sirius’s direction indicates to Sirius that he’s definitely the manager. “We were not expecting you, sir,” he says. He shakes hands with Sirius and then shakes Remus’s hand as well, which warms Sirius to him.

 

“Yeah, sorry. The visit was kind of unplanned.”

 

“Ah, of course, of course. A spur of the moment break from the grind of the day to day. I completely understand, sir. Will you be dining at the club tonight? Or perhaps a drink from the bar? Naturally, your suite is already being prepared so you can head upstairs in just a few moments. Might I inquire if you’d like us to prepare another room for…?” He turns to Remus, who quickly introduces himself. “Would you like another room for Mr. Lupin?”

 

“No, thank you, he’ll be staying with me. And we’ll probably be taking dinner in our room.”

 

“Splendid, sir. Marvelous idea. Please let us know if there’s anything at all that you need.” He gives a small bow and then gestures expansively with his hands and says, “Please follow me.” They walk past the flower display, which Sirius can now see is filled with hothouse orchids, his mother’s favorite.

 

They bypass the rows of elevators on the other side of the lobby and slip into an alcove and then through a door marked “employees only.” Through this door is another elevator, set off all on its own in the narrow corridor.

The manager presses the lift button and the doors open at once. He waits until Sirius and Remus are inside before pressing the button again and bows, once more, as the doors close in front of him.

 

“Bit high strung, wasn’t he?” Remus says with a little laugh, once they are alone. “What was all that about?”

 

Sirius glances sidelong at Remus and sees him start as the lift begins to move on his own. He follows Remus’s gaze to the spot along the lift wall where there are usually rows of buttons for you to choose your floor from. On this wall there are only two buttons, one to make an emergency stop, and another labeled “intercom” that will allow anyone in the lift to ring the concierge desk.

 

“The lift only goes up to the penthouse suite,” Sirius explains.

 

“I thought you said the presidential suite was where we were going,” Remus says with a weak smile.

 

“No, no. I’ve never actually stayed at the presidential suite, but I did see it the last time they renovated it. See, you can pay to stay at the presidential suite, but you can’t pay to stay at the penthouse suite.”

 

“Because your family owns the penthouse suite?”

 

“No,” he says, as the lift doors open, “because we own the hotel.”

 

“Ah,” Remus says, his eyes widening slightly, and then, “ah,” again as he takes in the sitting room of the suite. “I suppose your family works in hotel managing? Or uh, real estate maybe? I should know this by now. I don’t…I don’t really know anything about your family. I’m sorry I haven’t asked. You know so much about my father and what my mother was like, I should’ve…but I kind of figured that you didn’t want to talk about it.”

 

“Yeah,” Sirius says. “I didn’t. But that’s why we’re here. So I can do some showing with my telling.”

 

He steps into the sitting room of the suite and feels, as he often does whenever he comes here at night, as though he’s underwater. Every item in the sitting room, down to the stitches on the sofa cushions, is either silver or dark green, and with the way the dim lighting warbles through the lit chandelier and how, because they are in the penthouse, the noises of the street are distant and dulled to a whisper, the effect of entering the suite is like sinking below the waves and watching the world disappear above you. In the mornings and afternoons it was different, for all the furniture and rugs in the room had softer tones of green that only bright light could bring out, and when the sunlight would come through the chandelier crystals rainbows would be cast onto the walls, so it felt more like entering a private, enchanted glen. The nighttime was truer though, Sirius had always thought. To have the key to this room was to be a part of something that always made you feel as though you were drowning.

 

He throws himself onto the sofa with force, as someone might defiantly rattle their bonds before being pushed off a gangplank and into the unforgiving sea, and turns to see Remus still standing at the entrance of the lift, looking appropriately hesitant about entering the room. He’s holding himself with his shoulders tucked and keeps looking at his shoes. In the dimness he looks a bit like a castaway, and Sirius sees his clothes through his mother’s eyes: second-hand, cheap, and, in certain places, ink smudged. But Sirius himself has never been able to focus overlong on Remus’s clothes. He remembers, with an amount of fondness that startles him, the first time he met Remus’s eyes at the café near the university and how the lines of his face seemed to jump out at him, begging to be drawn, to be colored in with delicate water colors, to, finally and tenderly, be touched. He feels the need to be close to him as sharply as he had felt it the first time he stared into his eyes (which were brown, the color of solid ground) and he extends his hand to Remus now and says, “You’re not going to leave me all alone in here, are you?”

 

Remus smiles, seems to forget the state of his shoes and coat, and joins Sirius on the sofa. “Oh,” he says when he sits, “I rather thought this would be more comfortable.”

 

Sirius laughs. “Oh, come now. Don’t you know that style is far more important than comfort? Anyway, these are antiques. They’ve been in palaces and sat on by royalty. Those facts far outweigh the need for lumbar support.”

 

Remus smiles a little at that and begins to glance around the room again. From working in the map shop – which occasionally handles antiques – he must know how valuable some of these furnishings are, but there are certain things here that Remus’s boss cannot have even dreamed of touching and so which Remus probably knows very little about. Like the vases made of jade which sit on every flat surface, smuggled out of China two centuries prior; and the delicate porcelain decanter hand-painted with images of dramatic, dragon-like serpents; and the ornate sword mounted on the wall, which the family always said had belonged to an emperor but which in fact had belonged to one of the worst dictators in history; and each and every one of those items worth more than enough to buy the contents of Mr. Brewers’ store twice over. And all of these items so casually left in a hotel they infrequently visited; the dearer antiques, the things they owned which were quite literally priceless, stayed in vaults or at home. This kind of wealth had never struck Sirius as being particularly extraordinary – or malignant – until his late teens, at the point when his life began to unravel, but because he had grown up with it he finds it hard to imagine his life without it and harder still to try to explain it. He says as much now, to Remus.

 

“You’re the first person I’ve ever dated who doesn’t know everything about me. Everyone I ever dated at boarding school, the one girl I saw in university…they all knew about my family. We’re quite famous, you know, in certain circles. We ought to be more famous,” he says that last grimly. He frowns. “So I just…I don’t know how or even where to begin.”

 

“Perhaps with what happened to make you stop speaking to me?” Remus says, in his calmest and most instructive tone, which Sirius always refers to as his professor voice. He smiles then and before he can think better of it he turns and says, “My cousin Bellatrix took pictures of us on our dates and sent them to me.”

 

Remus’s eyes widen. “What? Why? Did she say why?” He sits up, trying and failing to find a more comfortable position in the stiff couch. “Is she some sort of amateur photographer or –”

 

Sirius laughs sourly. “Unlikely. She had them sent to me as a kind of blackmail, I guess you could call it. She tried to use them on my mother first –”

 

“Oh, no, Sirius,” Remus interrupts, looking stricken. “Is everything alright between you two? Have I…”

 

Sirius waves Remus’s concern away. “Nothing has ever been right between us,” he says, “so it’s not your fault. And she knows I’m queer, I’ve told her a dozen times. The trouble is she…forgets. She’s…didn’t James tell you any of this? At the Halloween party?”

 

Remus shakes his head. Delicately, he says, “I just know that she’s ill.”

 

“Yeah, ill is a good word for it I suppose. When we were talking she thought it was the sixties or whenever and that I could get arrested for…what would it be? Sodomy? Point is, she’s not well. She’d been ‘unstable’ for years,” he cringes here, having used the word his father always had, “but then she got worse. She had a nervous breakdown when my brother…” He hesitates on the verge; finds he can’t say it. “My family is fucked up, Remus. So, so fucked up. This…” he gestures at the room and its treasures. “This is the shine on the turd. This is how we’ve gotten away with so much. If you knew…when you know…”

 

Remus takes his hand. “It’s not going to change how I feel about you.”

 

Sirius manages a faint smile and swallows. “Let me order a drink, will you?”

 

Remus nods and Sirius calls down to the manager. He knows the drink menu of the hotel backwards and forwards, has poured centuries old wine down the tub in this suite for the sake of a photo and chased it with a scotch worth its weight in silver, but what he orders is beer, bottled, the brand Remus favors. It arrives in what feels like half a minute and he downs half a bottle before returning to sit beside Remus on the shoulder of the sofa.

 

“The trouble is – with these photographs, I mean – doesn’t have so much to do with my mother as it does with…well, as it does with you.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Sirius begins to bite at his cuticle again, and tastes dried blood. Gently, Remus takes his hand and pulls it away from his mouth, wincing slightly when he sees the damage Sirius has done to his nail bed.

 

“Do you remember the night in the Argentinian place? In the alley? You fucked me up against the wall?”

 

Remus’s expression tightens. There is no cheekiness, no “how could I forget?” Because Remus is nothing if not quick-witted and he has already jumped to the end of Sirius’s preamble.

 

“Surely it was too dark for a clear picture,” he says through his teeth.

 

Sirius bites his lip in lieu of his cuticle. “Not dark enough.”

 

“Do you have it with you?” Remus asks.

 

Sirius nods, takes the picture out from the inside pocket of his jacket, and hands it over. He sees what must have been his exact reaction mirrored in Remus’s face: an eye squint of confusion, trying to make sense of the shapes in the near dark, and then the blanch of shock and outrage. He braces himself for Remus’s anger and feels, at once, it lashing against his ears.

 

“What the fuck gives her the right?” Remus snaps out. He curses so rarely that the effect on Sirius is like seeing a gun pulled out in a crowded room: a violent shock. It winds him tighter, waiting for that blow to fall on him. “Who does something like this? It’s illegal, it has to be. And I realize that’s rich considering that we were in public fuc – doing what we did, but – but there was no harm in that! Right?”

 

The snap in Remus’s voice has dissipated down to concern; he’s looking at Sirius like he needs reassurance, a blush coming onto his cheeks now.

 

“The only harm we did was to the wall,” Sirius says briskly. “It’s not like anyone on the street saw.”

 

“Yeah,” Remus says, worrying his lip with his teeth. “Yeah, you’re right.”

 

Sirius stares at him as he looks back down at the picture, blanching all over again, and waits for the anger to come back. But Remus only sighs heavily, and sets the picture aside so that he can take a long swig of his beer.

 

“Um,” Sirius says, clearing his throat, “aren’t you…you know, aren’t you mad at me?”

 

Remus raises an eyebrow. “Why would I be mad at you?”

 

Sirius glances away from him. “Because I knew about it beforehand,” he says. “She’d already come to the house – her and this arsehole Riddle – and she’d shown some other pictures – not this one – to my mother and I more or less kicked her out of the house for good.”

 

“I still don’t see how you’re to blame for this.”

 

“Because I should’ve known!” Sirius exclaims, pulling a hand through his hair. “I should’ve known she wasn’t going to stop until she got something she could blackmail me over! I should’ve said something but I didn’t because then I knew I’d have to explain about my whole fucking awful family and that once you knew – once you _know_ about them you’re going to…”

 

Remus rises from his seat and Sirius’s heart drops; he’s leaving him already. And who could blame him, after all? Who would stay –

 

“Sirius,” Remus says gently, his hand once again on Sirius’s, pulling it away from his mouth. “Do you have any mercurochrome here, or any band-aids? I think we ought to bandage that up.” Sirius stares blankly at him for a moment and then glances down at the bloody mess he’s made of both sides of his cuticle.

 

“Uh…I don’t…I don’t think there’s anything,” he says. He tastes blood on his lips as he speaks, and, embarrassed, he turns his head to wipe it away.

 

“Right, shall I call down for some then?” Remus asks, and goes to the phone without waiting for a response. “Just dial zero,” Sirius says when he catches him looking round for a directory.

 

“Right, of course. Hm…oh. Hello. Do you have any bandages you could spare for us here in the, uh, the penthouse suite? Yes? Oh, lovely. And would it be possible for us to get two hot chocolates? With marshmallows if you’ve got them, please. Wonderful. No, take your time.” He hangs up the phone, and then at once rounds on Sirius, wagging a finger in his face. “I’m paying for the hot chocolates.”

 

“They’re probably like fifteen pounds each,” Sirius warns.

 

Remus blanches again, but remains firm. “Well, my God, Sirius, I’ve got thirty quid I’m not that broke.”

 

“They’re not going to charge for them anyway”.

 

Remus narrows his eyes. “What kind of sense does that make, I ask you? Why give someone rich free things when they’ve got the money to pay for it? It’s your lot that’s ruining the economy, not mine, and I don’t mean any offense by that I’m just stating the facts.”

 

Sirius struggles to smother a smile; he so loves Remus like this. “That may be true but I actually think the reason they won’t have me charged is because I own the hotel, remember?”

 

“Oh. Right. D’you know I think I might’ve blacked out when you said that?”

 

Sirius manages a thin chuckle.

 

“This is only the tip of the iceberg, is it?”

 

Sirius nods.

 

“Well. Good thing we have that cocoa coming then.”

 

It arrives on cue, steaming hot and in a pristine white, tulip shaped glass. A small, unopened package of bandages in multiple sizes lies unopened beside it. Remus leaves the room and after calling back to Sirius for directions manages to find his way to the bathroom and returns with a wet washcloth. He cleans Sirius’s thumb, clucking over how the poor maid will have to wash the bloodstains out, and wraps a bandage over it. Sirius has never had anyone clean his cuts or put bandages over them – he’d learned how to do it for himself when he was only four – and he watches with some amazement as Remus goes through the process, and can’t help the superstitious feeling that now the cut will heal faster than normal.

 

Remus moves the bottles of beer aside to make room for the hot chocolate on the coffee table. He hands Sirius his cup, taking care not to brush against his injured thumb. “My mum always said that all problems should be dealt with over a nice mug of hot chocolate. That way if you’re not able to solve the problem, at least you’ve had hot chocolate.”

 

Sirius doesn’t care to repeat any of the things his mother always said; he feels it would ruin the moment. Instead, he brings the mug of hot chocolate to his lips and takes a sip. The taste of it is like being welcomed into a warm, fire lit room; everything about it, down to the thick, creamy texture is cozy. It coats his tongue, the chocolate striding the pleasant median between the sweetness of milk and the bite of dark, and he tastes beneath it a hint of salt and caramel. The requested marshmallows are huge, perfectly square and, as he knows from past experience, are flavored very lightly with champagne.

 

In the menu the hotel refers to it as “drinking chocolate” not hot chocolate, and it feels to Sirius that it’s earned that pretension, and, apparently, so does Remus.

 

“Jesus H Christ!” he exclaims after the first sip, holding the mug away from him and examining it in the light as if to be certain that it’s real.

 

“Yeah, it’s alright,” Sirius says, and then he almost has to laugh at the incredulous look on Remus’s face.

 

“Brilliant is what this is!” Remus goes on, taking another sip and licking a droplet of chocolate from the rim. “Good Lord. Well. Ahem. I seem to be in a very forgiving mood now, Sirius, so it’s probably a good time to tell me whatever it is you think will make me mad at you.”

 

Sirius feels his expression freeze, the reprieve he’d been granted over. “It’s not that I think you’ll be mad at me,” he says softly, “though you will be. It’s that I think you’ll leave me.”

 

Unlike James, Remus doesn’t rush to dismiss this outright. He always leans more towards pragmatism than not, it’s what makes his few extravagant gestures – like the way he ordered hot chocolate with the bandages – more intense for Sirius. Nevertheless, his voice still has a gentle quality when he says, “Try me.”

 

“It’s kind of a long story,” he warns.

 

“Does the kitchen stay open all night to take hot chocolate orders?”

 

“I believe so.”

 

“Then go ahead.”

 

Sirius looks at him intently, taking in the expression on his face, the fall of his hair, the line of his shoulders, and longs to draw him from tip to toe all over again. His fingers curl against his legs, as if round a pencil, and he allows himself one last moment of panic stricken worry that he was only ever meant to fuck this up, along with every other good thing in his life. But he also knows that he owes this to Remus and so he will tell him everything without censoring a single feeling or dark impulse or trying to make himself look any better than he really is.

 

He takes a deep breath, and then he begins.

 

“My family’s mausoleum. That’s my first memory. It made me aware for the first time of this feeling I’ve had ever since. Like I’m trapped but also like I’m my own jailor. Like no matter how far I think I’ve gotten away I still haven’t managed to let myself out. The lunatics running the asylum and all that. I know it’s hard to understand. I’ll try to explain it better. The mausoleum: we were there for my grandfather’s funeral.”

 

It takes him all night, the room growing ever more submerged in sepulchral shadows and becoming ever colder, as if they truly were descending down into the freezing deep, where drowning is a luxury compared to what the pressure can do to you.

It hurts and it would be lying to say that it doesn’t. It has hurt every time he’s ever thought about it, and it hurts even more now that he’s speaking of it, making it real by giving it breath. But it’s a hurt like a scorching iron touching a profusely bleeding wound, a hurt that cauterizes, a hurt that he somehow knows will stem future pain.

 

When he begins he is alone on the wing-backed chair, his hands folded in front of him, and his eyes averted from Remus. But it is not long before he’s on the sofa beside Remus, sitting so close he’s practically in his lap. He does not remember at which point he felt bold enough – or desperate enough – to seek comfort in Remus; all he knows is that that comfort was given, and readily.

 

It is a long night, even if only because it encompasses all the other long nights of his life. There are points when he cries, points when he must jump up and stride back and forth across the room in quick, desperate pacing, but mostly he sits there, his head on Remus’s shoulder, Remus’s fingers brushing through his hair, and feels the solidness of Remus along the curve of his neck and knows that because he is there he will make it to the end.

 

Dawn breaks with a force like thunder; it startles them out of their seats. He had just finished explaining Regulus’s disappearance and crimes – not even troubling to neglect his discovery of the sketchbook – and the suddenness of the light coming into the room feels like a premature rolling of credits on a film not yet done.

 

Remus blinks at the light and then looks down at his watch, and Sirius remembers that it’s a weekday and they’re both due to be other places within the next two hours.

 

“I made you stay up all night,” Sirius rasps, his voice nearly gone.

 

“Please,” Remus says dismissively, though his eyes are red-rimmed again and his face is drawn. He had spoken a lot last night too, and though his voice is not nearly as hoarse as Sirius’s it still has a rasp to it. He’d asked questions at points, which Sirius felt natural, but more often he had said things that Sirius didn’t truly believe he’d heard right. In a hundred different phrasings and a hundred different gestures he had kept saying, “This isn’t your fault.”

 

Why was it that the one time Remus had said that plainly that Sirius had cried harder than he had at any other point in the night?

 

But now the veil is lifted – everything said and daylight coming in with its exposing glance – and Remus is shifting away from him, standing up and carefully stretching out his leg. He glances down at the coffee table, where from the amount of chocolate rimed mugs it can be accurately deduced that they went on a hot chocolate bender, and then glances again his way.

 

“I’d like to stay,” he says.

 

“But?”

 

“No but. I’d like to stay, is that alright? I’d like to sleep but if there’s more, of course –”

 

“No more.”

 

“‘But.’ ‘No more.’ Have you always been this eloquent?” Remus teases, coming to stand in front of Sirius and cupping his chin.

 

Sirius manages a smile and bends his head so he can kiss Remus’s palm.

 

“I’m going to call in sick to work, and I think you ought to contact your professors and take the day off school,” Remus says. He takes over from there, handing Sirius the phone to call the university, and then steering him into the bathroom to brush his teeth. Sirius lets himself be led; he feels too emptied out to do anything more than curl into himself.

 

Still he insists Remus get some sleeping pills for him; he doesn’t want to have to lie awake with all he’s had to relive last night. Remus obliges, though he sets his mouth in a thin line, and they make their way to the master bedroom where he lets out a loud sigh when he makes contact with the bed.

 

“Oh, thank God. I worried this was going to be as uncomfortable as that damnable couch.”

 

Sirius smiles, and then sleep comes for him almost instantaneously, with him barely registering the curl of Remus’s spine through his undershirt on the bed next to him before he’s out and away. When he wakes he feels like he’d only blinked: he’s still strung through with tiredness and there’s a tacky taste on his tongue, but at least the hours have passed without him noticing.

 

Remus had already finished dressing by the time the sleeping pills ebbed away and he stumbles to the bathroom and back to make himself presentable. He looks at the clock and sees they’ve slept through the bulk of the day. Remus suggests they leave for an early dinner and Sirius, his stomach rumbling, can do nothing but agree.

 

They go no farther than the first floor of the hotel, where there is a sleekly styled Japanese restaurant with modern interpretations of ukiyo-e style art on the walls. It’s what passes for a casual eatery in the Noble House – the other principal restaurants being a five star steakhouse, and a half-hidden Italian venue that had one only ten tables, a year long waiting list, and a chef stolen from a famous Tuscan restaurant – though nevertheless the prices of the food make Remus do a double take, and then a triple take when he realizes he’d only been looking at the appetizers.

 

They order, and then don’t have to wait long before their sushi and sashimi platters come out and are set before them, a banquet of vibrant color. Sirius takes only two bites before Remus, who had drained his miso soup in one gulp and who has already demolished half his sushi rolls, spares him from waiting any longer and tells him, unequivocally, that they won’t be breaking up over this.

 

“Over the sushi?” Sirius tries to joke, his limbs aching with relief and lingering tiredness.

 

“You wish I’d break up with you over sushi. No, if I ever need to cut you loose it’ll be somewhere I can throw hot coffee in your face.”

 

They bumble through a few more increasingly weak jokes and then Remus returns to last night. He’s sorry, he tells Sirius, that all of that happened to him, sorrier still that Sirius felt he couldn’t tell him about it. And yes, he admits, he’s pissed about the photographs and hates the thought of that picture of them in the alley ending up online or worse – to him – in print. But they’ll find a way to deal with Bellatrix and Riddle, he says, seeming convinced. And then he takes a deep breath and tells Sirius that as grateful as he is that Sirius felt he could trust him with all this he thinks it would be good for him to go over the whole thing again, but with a therapist.

 

Sirius starts shaking his head on the first syllable of the word, recoiling both from the thought of having to repeat everything from last night again as well as the idea of having to submit all these things to the scrutiny of a head doctor.

 

“They’ll commit me,” he blurts out, rushing ahead to his terminal fear. “Or get me arrested for being an accessory after the fact because I should’ve known about Regulus.”

 

“You won’t get committed. Maybe you’ll get a prescription for your depression –”

 

“I’m not depressed, who said I’m depressed?”

 

Remus purses his lips, glances away, and then, on the tail of another sigh says, “I’ve actually been thinking of going to one myself.”

 

“What?” Sirius bursts out, far louder than intended. He looks round, embarrassed, and then continues on more quietly, “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

 

“Well…a lot of things, Sirius. My mum dying and…and well, us. Or rather, me within us. I just can’t stop feeling like I’m going to self-sabotage and ruin this.”

 

“We have that in common,” Sirius says softly, reaching across the table to take Remus’s hand. “But you know you can talk to me about that.”

 

“No, I can’t,” Remus says. “Because I find that difficult, and in order to not find it difficult I need to see a therapist. The only reason I can even talk about it now is because of all that you told me last night. I lay awake after you went to sleep and I kept thinking about – about oh, a lot of different things. But mainly how we’re both hurting and how we both need help.”

 

Sirius feels his face fall. “But I thought…well, apart from what’s just happened I thought everything with us was going well.”

 

“Our relationship _is_ going well, Sirius. But being in love doesn’t erase every other problem in your life. Maybe it makes your problems easier to bear, but some things you shouldn’t need to bear. Some things you should try to heal. The metaphor is getting a little mixed there, I’m sorry, but you see my point.”

 

It takes a bit more back and forth and two more rounds of green tea before Sirius agrees to see a therapist; he does it because he doesn’t believe there’s any other way to get Remus off the subject. And Remus looks so relieved that Sirius knows at once that he’s made the right call.

 

Outside the hotel the snowfall of the night before has melted down to a sheen on the sidewalks. It throws off a dull reflection, like glaze, and Sirius holds Remus by the elbow as they walk to the corner to hail a cab so his cane doesn’t slip and send him flying. The sky is a surly, gunmetal gray and Sirius can’t tell if he’s faking his own optimism or if he really does think that now that he’s told Remus everything is going to be okay.

 

…

 

Spring begins in fits and starts – rain lashing at the windows, turning to sleet one hour and then back to rain the next, green buds showing themselves on trees and flowerbeds but failing to bloom for days and days – and Sirius, as he promised, begins to look for a therapist.

 

He begins with a recommendation from his usual doctor and finds himself in the presence of a chubby, mustachioed man who, if the rumors are to be believed, has treated every celebrity and member of high society in the city. “I normally have a months’ long waiting list,” Dr. Slughorn says during their first and only meeting, “but when I saw your name and realized who you were, of course I bumped you up to the front of the line.” He then proceeds to alternatively pester Sirius about his relationship with his mother – this is the crux, he will learn, of every psychoanalysis – and hock one of his books about the perils of coming from a wealthy family. Sirius, in turn, uses all the descriptors  and anecdotes he can remember about Cathy from _Wuthering Heights_ to describe his mother, and accepts a free copy of Slughorn’s book for the express purpose of dumping it in the nearest garbage bin.

 

He is no more successful with the second doctor his GP recommends, and actually, if anything, he finds Dr. Carrow more difficult to deal with. She’s presumptuous, referring almost immediately to his brother – she’d followed his case in the newspapers “eagerly” – and tries to bait him with provocative questions about – who else? – his mother. Purely to prove he can be far more provocative he spends the bulk of the hour describing lurid sexual fantasies that he has never had in exhaustive detail. At points he’s essentially just reciting lyrics from early 90’s rap, but as Carrow seems more up on crime news than music history he gets away with it.

 

Meanwhile, Remus has already had four successful sessions with his own therapist. Like an implausible romantic comedy they’d actually hit it off while on line for coffee at the café round the corner from her office. They’d had a meet cute moment and everything: they’d both bent to look into the display case of pastries at the same time and gently bumped each other’s heads. Alice – and she insists Remus call her Alice – is fresh from her certification and just beginning to build her practice, so Remus gets her at enough of a discount to afford her. (He and Sirius had a bit of a row over this when Sirius offered to pay for what his insurance wouldn’t cover for a much more experienced therapist. When Remus had come home after his first brilliant session with Alice he had been so smug over his success without Sirius’s money that Sirius almost burned their dinner out of spite. He didn’t, though; he just couldn’t do that to Remus – or, frankly, the lasagna.)

 

While Remus begins to make progress – in particular with his grief for his mother – Sirius tries again and again with other therapists, but finds only one dud after another. He can’t stand one because he stutters, another is far too severe, the one after that far too simpering, and finally there is the one he’s certain is secretly recording him.

 

He grows tired of it. Tired of having to call and make appointments, tired of the forms he has to fill out and the way the therapists look when they read them, tired of the way they all ask, “What do you think that means?”, tired of the way their pens scratch across their notepads as they note all his faults, tired of himself and the way he resorts to lying every time because he cannot suppress the need to recoil when they ask him why he’s here. He wants to stop. There’s no point to it anyway. He’s already spilled his guts to Remus, why should he have to do it a second time with a stranger? He tries to bring this up to Remus, but what with how well his own therapy is going he insists that Sirius should keep trying to find the right therapist.

 

“But there’s no right therapist,” he says at last over a shared lunch at the café near the university. “And I’m sick of seeing all the wrong ones.”

 

“First impressions aren’t everything, Sirius. You’ve never gone back for a second appointment. And you stormed out of that one –”

 

“He said the word ‘Oedipal’ in all seriousness, Remus. I was well within my rights.”

 

Remus sighs. “Fine. But you know if you would only try to—”

 

“I’m tired of trying,” Sirius says, only just able to keep his voice beneath a shout. “I’m done.”

 

Remus frowns, goes to take Sirius’s hand and then seems to think better of it. He’s quiet for a long moment and then he says. “One more.”

 

“Oh, come on, Remus –”

 

“Just one more,” Remus says, holding up a finger. “But you’d have to go for three sessions.”

 

Sirius sighs heavily. “And then we can stop talking about this?”

 

“If you want to.”

 

“I’ll want to,” Sirius says, and he downs the remains of his coffee.

 

For the rest of the day Remus does what all people in relationships do when they have won a tricky argument and is as pleasant and accommodating as humanly possible. He flatters Sirius over his restaurant choice for dinner, puts up no fight over the check the way he normally does, and coyly runs his hand up the inside of Sirius’s thigh two tantalizing times  during the cab ride to his flat. Still, after they’ve made a mess of the sheets he doesn’t unbend quite enough to respond to Sirius’s hint that they ought to move in together.

 

“A bigger bed would be nice, wouldn’t it? Maybe a bigger kitchen too,” Sirius says.

 

“I hate shopping for sheets,” is all Remus will say to this, and when he yawns and burrows his nose into the crook of Sirius’s neck the conversation is over anyway.

 

The next day Sirius makes his last appointment with a new therapist. Tired of hauling himself to every corner of the city he places a call to his university’s medical center and asks for an appointment with the first available therapist. They ask him for his preferences – woman or man? Specializations? – but he waves all questions away. “I just want an appointment before the end of the month,” he tells them.

 

A week and a half later and he finds himself standing outside Dr. Minerva McGonagall’s office, wondering what kind of bullshit he’s going to end up cooking up this time. There’s no waiting area for any of the university’s therapists: his options are to lurk outside her door or loiter by the drink machine round the corner and hope she’ll stick her head out and call out his name. But the moment she opens her door he sees that this is not a woman who would let a screech fly down the corridor.

 

The door swings open without a hint of dilly-dallying or trepidation and then he’s face to face with a black-haired woman whose mouth is set in a thin line, and whose steely expression plainly says that she has seen it all, done it all and is left, frankly, unimpressed. If he hadn’t known better he’d have thought she was a retired general – or, even more fearsomely, a retired ballet instructor.

 

“Black,” she says, no savoring of the vowels, no simpering over his stature. She sticks out her hand, gives his a brisk shake, and then waves him inside. Though her office easily blends with all the other therapists’ offices he’s been into lately there’s something so distinctly professorial about it – the papers half-graded on the desk, photocopies everywhere, and the university pendant hung on the wall – that he feels more like he’s about to talk to his academic advisor than a therapist. The result is that he feels a little wrong-footed by this, but not in a bad way.

 

“Have a biscuit,” she says, gesturing to the store brand biscuit box that’s half opened on her desk. He takes one and does nothing to hide his dissatisfaction with its taste. She watches him chew, one eyebrow raised, but says nothing.

 

He sits himself down on the couch without asking; he knows the procedure by now, so why bother with the niceties. She’s got a tartan throw over the back of the couch that he finds himself liking, and one way or another, due to the colors of the tartan being similar to the school’s team colors, they get to talking about football, specifically the school match Sirius attended two days ago with James, and which she was also present at.

 

“Pitiful, just pitiful,” she says of the team’s crushing loss, viciously snapping off a bite of biscuit with her canines. “I hesitate to even call that football.”

 

Sirius doesn’t feel strongly about football one way or the other – he only goes to games to watch James, or hang out with James – but he finds McGonagall’s fervent passion for the sport endearing. “Did you ever play?” he asks her.

 

“Yes, and I could’ve wiped the floor with the lot of them; now, remind me, why are you here again?”

 

“My boyfriend wants me to try therapy. He thinks I need it,” he says. It’s the first time he’s answered this question honestly; she’d slipped it in too quickly for him to lie.

 

“Why does he think you need it?” she asks, wiping the biscuit crumbs from her fingertips on a tissue.

 

“Long story.”

 

“Hm,” she says, giving a nod before balling up the tissue and lobbing it into the nearby bin. “Do you think you need it?”

 

“I don’t really believe in therapy. At least not for me.”

 

McGonagall nods again. “So you’re just trying not to make waves with him.”

 

“Basically, yeah.”

 

“And I expect you’ve made an arrangement with him?”

 

“Yep. I make it through three sessions with you and I’m off the hook.”

 

“Only three? Low-balled him a bit, didn’t you?”

 

“You’re not the first therapist I’ve seen.”

 

She nods a bit more sympathetically this time. “Well, that’s a hard business. Finding the right therapist, I mean. And the right boyfriend too, quite frankly.”

 

“I got lucky with him,” he says, and finds himself preening.

 

“I’m glad to hear it,” she says. She glances, ever so briefly and with the slightest longing, at the biscuit tin again, and Sirius finds himself liking that about her too, that bit of softness under her steel. “Well, what would you like to talk about then? Because I’m not just going to let you sit there and stare into space every session.”

 

“I could go on my phone instead of staring into space,” he says, trying to suppress a smile.

 

“Not a chance,” she says.

 

“Alright, you choose what we talk about then.”

 

“Fine,” she says, and he’s surprised and pleased that she’s not refusing and flipping this back to him. “I saw in your file that you’re taking classes mainly in the science department here. Which discipline are you hoping to major in?”

 

“Biology, probably.”

 

“You prefer the more tangible aspect of science then? As it lives and breathes?”

 

“I don’t prefer science at all,” he says, not pausing to hem and haw and give the impression that he does in fact care about science the way he usually does with his advisors or professors.

 

“Then why bother taking all science classes?”

 

“Well, James is majoring in science,” he says. He’d already explained who James was when they were talking about football, so he’s free to add only, “He’ll go on to medical school after this, so he wants to have a good foundation. He’s aiming to be a doctor, like his mum.”

 

“Do you intend to follow him all the way through medical school?”

 

“No, the one degree will be enough for me.”

 

“So what will you do while he studies to become a doctor? You don’t need to work, after all. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Black, I pass three buildings with your name on them every day to and from my car. Let’s be plain: you’ll never need to work to make a living, though you can of course do so if you choose. Will you choose to do so?”

 

“I don’t know,” he says. “I might like to travel.”

 

“Well, that can certainly be fulfilling. I always try to plan a getaway for the school holidays, myself.”

 

Again, he finds himself liking her, this time for not dismissing travel as frivolous, and so he adds, “And I’ll spend a lot of time with Remus, I expect.”

 

“That’s your boyfriend?”

 

“Hopefully my husband by then. Or at least my fiancé.”

 

“Hm,” she says, sneaking another glance at the biscuit tin and this time taking one out. “Sounds like you’ve got a timeline worked out for your relationship then?”

 

That’s all it takes for him to pour it all out: what he hopes to do on their first anniversary, and their second. How he has a date for when he wants them to move in together by – and how that plan is being slightly flummoxed by his mother’s health, which he outlines briefly to McGonagall – and how he’d like them to have a pet together, and to be engaged the year they’re both twenty-eight, and married by the time they’re thirty. Elopement or wedding, he’s not sure yet; of course, he wants to discuss that with Remus.

 

“Very thorough,” she says, with what he thinks is an approving nod.

 

“This is what I’ve always wanted.”

 

She nods again, doesn’t press on this, and then asks, “And in the hours in between? When you’re not wooing him and proposing to him and serenading him? He’ll be at his job, and you’ll be…?”

 

He shrugs. “Somewhere. I don’t know.”

 

“Not even the foggiest?”

 

“I could make something up if you’d like.”

 

“Alright,” she says, and he blinks, confused, as she rises to her feet. She brings him a piece of paper and a pen and says, “That’s your assignment for next time. I want you to write what you imagine your future looking like. We’ve already gone five minutes over your hour so you can deduct that from your next session if you’re so inclined.”

 

He shrugs and smiles as he takes his leave, heading out the door to his biochemistry class down the hall. While waiting for the professor to arrive he asks James why he’s decided to major in biology and receives a litany on the marvels of the cell, before he moves on to mitosis and symbiosis, his voice lingering so lovingly on each ugly word that he almost makes them beautiful. He adds, at the end, that Lily loves biology too, sounding as though this is the spectacular icing on an already spectacular cake.

 

Sirius nods over this, feels the predictable gnawing concern that he doesn’t have half the fervor for the subject as James does, but turns that aside as he usually does, with the thought that he doesn’t have half the fervor for _anything_ James does.

 

After class James has football practice so Sirius heads alone to the new Italian market he’s discovered not far from campus. They have fresh mozzarella behind the glass of the counter, round and white as a snowball, and Sirius buys half a pound plus sprigs of oregano and basil. He’d ordered a pizza stone on a whim a week ago and it had arrived the night before. He’s going to attempt a one-two punch of good news for Remus when he gets home from work. The first punch: I did what you asked and had my first session with the university therapist! The second: I managed to make homemade pizza for the first time ever and I did it in your horrifically small kitchen!

 

Both things go over well, as he’d expected them to. Remus is pleased Sirius had gone to see McGonagall so soon after their chat, and the pizza is good enough to elicit compliments but misshapen enough that Sirius can drop another hint about them maybe moving into a place with a bigger kitchen together. As with the first time, his hint that they should move in together is received without any vocal indication that it’s been heard, but Sirius knows that expression on Remus’s face; he’s thinking about it.

 

He practically forgets his assignment for McGonagall until an hour before their next session that Friday. He reels off a little fantasy life – with an emphasis on the word fantasy – to see if she’ll try to read into the subtext of his nonsense to figure out how he’s damaged. He feels pleased about this little farce; she seems nice enough, but every therapist, he’s learned, has their little tricks to get you to “open up.” And he has no intention of being opened.

 

In their next session he presents the paper to her with a flourish and then lounges back on the couch, throwing both arms up onto the back of it. She has a new tin of biscuits on her desk today, but it’s the same brand from the first time he was here and he feels leery about giving them another try.

 

“So,” she says, setting aside her reading glasses and smoothing his essay over her lap, “you’d like a flying motorbike, hm?”

 

“Oh, yeah. Wouldn’t you? Free yourself from the airplane monopoly.”

 

“It’d be quite cold though. A flying car, now that would be the thing.”

 

He shrugs. “I don’t mind a bit of chill.”

 

“Well, clearly, as it seems you intend to live on the moon,” she says, gesturing to the essay.

 

“Be a bit of a downsize for me from my current place, but I don’t think you can beat the view.”

 

“Certainly not,” she says, her eyes drifting back down to the essay. He figures it’s time for the jokes to quit and for her to start talking about all the implications of what he’s written. But all she ends up saying is, “I see Remus is here on the moon as well.”

 

“Of course.”

 

She nods at that, then looks up at him again. “You know, I had an author friend of mine do this exercise once, and he added in some silliness like your flying motorbike too – I think his fanciful idea was some sort of aerial sport – but in his essay he remained an author, albeit a more successful one, just as you remain together with your boyfriend. Now this isn’t particularly surprising since you made it clear last time that you intend to have a lifelong commitment with him, and that’s why, to me, the rest of what you’ve written looks like a lot of frivolous bullshit.”

 

She lets the curse sit there for a moment, staring at him as his eyes widen. They widen even further when she lifts up his essay, folds it, and begins to tear it into quarters.

 

“You’re going to write this again. Only this time you’re going to concern yourself with the tangible: motorbikes that are on the ground and living areas that contain a life-sustaining atmosphere. Now that doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to trundling after Mr. Potter from class to class and to football games when you have no interest in the sport. What that means is that you should write something that’s imaginative but also within the bounds of reality. Here’s your paper, here’s your pen, let’s see how you do.”

 

Sirius stares at her, mouth slightly open. “You want me to do this now?”

 

“Well, if I assign it to you again you’re only going to scribble something out forty-five minutes before our next session just like you did with this one.”

 

Sirius finds he has the decency to blush. “It was half an hour,” he mumbles.

 

“Ooh, impressive,” she says sarcastically. “Write the essay. I’ll be at my desk with the latest psychology journal marveling at how it’s only my most idiotic colleagues who managed to get published.”

 

With that she leaves him alone with his blank paper, which he stares at, feeling disarmed. He checks the time and sees they still have forty minutes left in the session, far too much time to pretend he can’t come up with anything. He could get defiant and just stare at the paper for forty minutes but something in the way she’s turning the pages of the psychology journal – the briskness and the impatience of it – puts him in the mind of the timed tests of his youth. He’s never failed an exam; he wouldn’t know what to do if he ever got a grade below a B+. And although it isn’t, this still feels very much like something he’ll be graded on, so at the sound of her third, sharp page turn, he hurries to uncap the pen and write something, anything.

He begins with Remus moving in with him, choosing for their first flat together a location close to the biggest park in the city. The park is near his favorite Chinese restaurant and his third favorite French bakery, so he goes off on a tangent about how good it will be to get to go to those places more often, and how he’ll favorably review them in his award winning food blog – no, award winning food television program. A spark of defiance hits him and he decides that in addition to his award winning food show he’ll also be allowed to cook in all of these fabulous places, how do you like that, McGonagall? You wanted it real, now it’s real! Can’t call being a five star Michelin restaurateur (because that’s what he’s graduated to halfway down the page) frivolous bullshit now can you?

 

At the end, with a flourish, he and Remus adopt twenty cats because, why not? He’s always liked cats.

 

He flutters the paper at her, feeling the haughtiness that is his center of gravity restored. She gets up from her desk, plucks his essay from his fingers, and sits down to read it. Her smile, when it comes, is blatantly pleased.

 

“Now you’re cooking with gas,” she says and he laughs appreciatively at her pun.

 

“So you like to cook then?” she says. “Or you like food at any rate.”

 

“I like to cook, yeah.”

 

“Well then let me ask you this, Black: are you aware of the existence of culinary schools?”

 

He snorts. “It’s only a hobby.”

 

She leans back then, and says five words that change his life: “It doesn’t have to be.”

 

His eyes widen, and he considers her words like a suddenly opened door. All his life off this one narrow hallway – go to _this_ primary school and boarding school, learn only _these_ subjects, go to _this_ prestigious university where they only teach _these_ things – and now this new doorway into a new way forward he had never even considered. _Only ever this way_ , he had heard all his life, and now, McGonagall: _no, it’s not just this._

 

He sits with this quietly for a long while, and she lets him, her gaze sneaking, now and then, to the biscuit tin.

 

The next session they discuss every culinary and culinary adjacent job in existence. Chef, sommelier, baker, pastry chef, food blogger, restaurant critic, food historian (which was, she insisted, a real thing), caterer, food celebrity TV personality (which was, Sirius insisted, a real thing). He takes interest in the more lavish aspects of this potential career almost by rote – he could see himself cooking for an upscale, exclusive restaurant, or arranging elaborate catering menus for parties and events – but then veers away almost immediately. It’s nice to eat a fancy meal now and then, sure, but that isn’t really what the act of cooking is about, is it?

 

“What do you mean?” she asks.

 

“Well, cooking is about making something that’s more than just sustenance, but also something that’s more than a work of art. Foam makes a pretty plate, but if I’m near starving to death I’ll still be starving after I eat the two bites of it they give me. I can’t live on the act of creation, but I also can’t live without it, yeah? But to create for creation’s sake is like – why? Why do it? Why bother?” He’s rambling, trying to keep up with his own thoughts, asking and answering his own questions as they occur to him. “If I’m making food just for me it’s a fry-up and boom. I’m done, why be fancy? So that’s more on the sustenance side of things. But when you – or I, rather – cook for someone else, for Remus or for James or – well, it’s different. It’s perfectly between sustenance – because they don’t leave hungry – and being creative – because I don’t just throw two things together. When I’m cooking for other people it’s like I’m making a feeling too, or like I want whoever’s eating my food to feel that feeling. Am I making sense? It doesn’t sound like I’m making sense.”

 

“What kind of feeling?” she asks evenly.

 

“Oh, I don’t know. Like affection, I guess. Or, no. Something different. I always feel something different. It doesn’t have a name. It’s like – like –”

 

She gives him a single, encouraging nod, and he finds it.

 

“Home,” he says. “Like a feeling of being at home.”

 

“Do you feel that way often?”

 

“Not really.”

 

“But you do when you’re cooking?”

 

“I imagine what it would be like to have a home when I’m cooking. And I want whoever eats with me to share that homey feeling I guess.”

 

She nods. “Who taught you to cook?”

 

“I did. Mostly.”

 

“Who was the exception?”

 

“What?”

 

“Mostly doesn’t mean entirely. It means there was an exception to your usual practice of self-teaching. Who was the exception?”

 

And only because there are only fifteen minutes left in his last session with her, he admits it: “My mother.”

 

There’s no aha! gotcha moment like he’d expected there would be when he brought his mother up to a therapist. Instead, all she asks is, “What did she teach you to make?”

 

He reels off the names of the dishes, primarily French and primarily desserts, and dismisses them with a hand wave. “I don’t make them anymore,” he says.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Too much work, and…”

 

“And?”

 

“I don’t want to remember her that way.”

 

She sits, waiting for him to continue, and to his surprise he does: “I don’t like to think about the times she was nice to me. It’s confusing. Just like those fucking French recipes.”

 

“Can you remember any of the recipes?”

 

How elegantly done, he’ll think later that night, the way McGonagall led him from the recitation of a recipe, to the memory of his mother teaching him that recipe, to how it felt to have that moment with her, just the two of them, her hand, though not softly, guiding his on the correct way to hold a knife, how much he’d loved her then, and how much he finds it impossible to love her now. He’d felt the need to justify this feeling to McGonagall, to explain the things she’d said to him as a boy and an adolescent, and before he knew it another hour had gone by and he’d cried twice and had an appointment to meet her again the following Friday.

 

“Nice job today, Black,” she’d said as she’d walked him to the door of her office and gave his shoulder a firm pat. “Keep this up and I might consider getting a different brand of biscuits just for you.”

 

…

 

He can hardly believe it: he’s found a therapist, and he might have some idea of what he wants to do for the rest of his life.

 

Now if only he didn’t have to deal with Bellatrix and those fucking photographs.

 

Her response to him trying to buy her off was to cash the check he’d written her and send every bit of that money back to him in pennies. It was delivered to Grimmauld Place in five extremely heavy boxes that had been filled to the brim so that it was impossible to open them without pennies spilling out all over the place; Sirius is still finding ones that had rolled beneath the hall table and into the sitting room. At the bottom of one of the boxes was a note that more or less said that the next time they communicated it had better be face to face or he’d regret it. She implied that there might be more photographs, clearer ones, and if he didn’t want them posted online he’d better call her and make a date to meet.

 

Sirius is inclined to do just that. He wants to have it out with her face to face, but Remus is against it, thinking, probably rightly, that doing so would only cause Sirius to lose his temper and give her more ammo. They argue about this and can come to no resolution, though they both cite things that Alice and McGonagall have said respectively to back up their cases. They part angrily and unhappily and though they both call to apologize a few hours later there remains some tension simmering in the air between them.

 

Alright, so maybe the photographs aren’t the only remaining problem in Sirius’s life. The arguments that he and Remus have about what to do about them often cast allusions to the other central issue in their relationship: money.

 

“You can’t just buy her off, Sirius,” Remus keeps saying. “Money can’t solve everything.”

 

“But it can solve _this_ ,” Sirius says. And it can solve the draftiness of your too small flat, the flimsiness of your cheap cane, the way your diet consists of day old breads and baked beans, he wants to say but doesn’t. It’s hard to come out and say something like that, but the silence and half-baked arguments they keep having are not sustainable, and McGonagall has given him too much homework against bottling things in for him to keep quiet for much longer.

 

They finally have it out at the end of May, a thunderstorm punctuating the ferocity of their back and forth. They come to it when the lights flicker out, briefly, ominously, and Sirius says, “You wouldn’t have to worry about the bloody rent if you’d just move in with me!”

 

“I’m not going to be your charity case,” Remus says as the thunder rolls in, forcing him to shout. “I don’t want you to have to take care of me. It just means you’re going to get tired of me all the more quickly.”

 

The thunder drains away quickly, and Sirius can hear the frailty of Remus’s voice in the last thing he says, the naked vulnerability.

 

“I’m not going to get tired of you,” he says, and the lights flicker out, longer this time.

 

He hears Remus take a breath – a sigh verging on something harder, perhaps a sob – and he says, “I’m not going to get any better. Physically, I mean. I’m not. I’ll be a burden when we’re older.”

 

“What, and I’m not going to be? You think you’re not going to have to take care of me sometimes?”

 

“I…I suppose so.”

 

“And I don’t like that word: burden,” Sirius goes on, fiercely. “That’s like something that weighs you down, something you _have_ to carry. I don’t _have_ to carry you, Remus. You carry yourself and if I can I try to help you, but you’re not a burden. Alright?”

 

The lights come back on and Remus’s face is full in his view. His eyes are red-rimmed, and there’s a tear caught in his lashes. He looks at Sirius for a moment and then bends to rest his head on Sirius’s shoulder. Sirius wraps his arms around him, rubbing circles on his back as he sniffles.

 

“This is a lot,” Remus says into Sirius’s shoulder, and Sirius knows exactly what he means. Therapy has been helpful, healing even, but it also feels at times like going through a move: promising and exciting, but edged through with emotional disruptions and, at times, complete disarray. He thinks often, too, of old black and white slapstick comedies, where every crazy thing that could possibly happen – pies in the face, circus animals on the loose, mistaken identities – keeps happening to the main character but somehow they keep on going with a smile on their face.

 

They sit down at the teeny kitchen table Remus finally bought and Sirius makes hot chocolate from the cocoa powder Remus keeps tucked in the back of the cabinet. Remus gives him a watery smile when he sees what he’s making, but grimaces when he takes a sip from his mug.

 

“Your bloody hotel has ruined me for all other hot chocolate,” he says.

 

“Just in the same way I hope I’ve ruined you for other men.”

 

Remus rolls his eyes at this, but he blushes slightly too, which encourages Sirius enough to say, “Before…you said when _we’re_ old…do you picture us old together?”

 

“Sometimes.”

 

“What do you imagine?”

 

“Oh, I don’t know…” Remus says, taking care to set down his mug.

 

“Please. Tell me.”

 

Remus’s eyes drop to the table, but his gaze goes inward, to the landscape of his thoughts, and Sirius wonders if he’ll ever get a chance to peek into them as well.  Remus is quiet for long enough that Sirius is prepared to tell him to forget it, but before he can Remus says, “Wisteria. And bougainvillea, probably.”

 

“What?”

 

“That’s what I see growing outside our house. Our cottage, really.” He’s tracing his thumb along the rim of the mug but his gaze is still inward, unseeing. “It’s a little place, but pretty. We used to – well, I imagine we used to, anyway – live in the city, of course, and we stayed there for a long time. Most of our lives, anyway. You had a nice shop – I won’t say what I think you sold, I don’t want to sway you – and I…” His eyes dart up, his gaze focusing on Sirius for a fraction of a second before he glances back down in a distinctly shy, hesitant gesture. “I was a professor. At your university. Art history. Anyway, we’ll have retired, and we’ll knock about for awhile with traveling and going to museums and what not in the city, but then we’ll want a change and we’ll move out to the country. I imagine that place you took me to for my birthday. Beautiful like that. Where we can draw together and maybe have a dog or a cat. And just… _be_ , for however long we can be.”

 

He lets out a little huff of breath, and he blushes again and resumes trailing his thumb around the top of the mug. He makes one circuit before Sirius reaches out and tangles their fingers together.

 

“I want that too,” he says, his voice tight with emotion. “I want to grow old with you.”

 

“We haven’t even been going out for a year,” Remus says, sounding like he’s trying to convince himself to be practical. He has experience stuffing down his dreams and hopes, Sirius knows, of having to set them aside, but he won’t let him do that now.

 

“When’s the right time, Remus? When would it be long enough? I’ll tell you when: when you _know_. In your heart, in your bones, in your fucking blood. There’s no benchmark for this. There can’t be. Everyone’s too different for that.”

 

“McGonagall tell you all that?” Remus says. His voice is dry, but Sirius can see he’s starting to smile.

 

“Of course, yeah, but she used an entirely different metaphor.”

 

Remus’s smile breaks free and he nods and takes a breath. “I still think it’s too early to be moving in together,” he says. Speaking quickly to stop Sirius from challenging this he says, “I just worry that if we rush things we’ll ruin them. I’m not saying we have to wait years but just…not today alright.”

 

“What about tomorrow?”

 

Remus rolls his eyes. “You know what I meant.”

 

“Yeah. Yeah, alright.” He leans back in his chair, takes a sip of hot chocolate. “Shall we get the money talk over with though?”

 

Remus nods. “Alright.”

 

Sirius taps the table. “What if we did it where we each pay half the rent?”

 

Remus’s eyebrows go up. “You’d be willing to do that? That would still be quite a small place.”

 

“I’m trying to illustrate to you that I’m capable of compromise,” Sirius says, doing a fair impression of McGonagall’s brisk cadence. “But yeah, you know. I can manage.”

 

Remus thinks about this for a moment. “Maybe,” he says at last, “it wouldn’t hurt my pride to pay a little less than that. A third of the rent? Or a fourth?”

 

“An eighth.”

 

“Let’s not get ridiculous. A third or a fourth, depending on how much you fall in love with the counter space or whatever it is that makes kitchens so alluring.”

 

“The allure is the food. Come on. That’s obvious.”

 

“Right.”

 

Sirius grins at him. “Did we just do this? Did we just compromise?”

 

“Do you know, I believe we did.”

 

“We’re so grown up,” Sirius says, clapping a bit.

 

“Yeah, yeah, sure we are. Now go get us some more hot cocoa will you?”

 

Sirius does as requested and rejoins Remus at the table, where they sit and watch as the lights continue to flicker in increasingly long intervals and the thunderstorm slowly abates.

 

…

 

“Let’s return to Regulus,” McGonagall says one day in mid-June as the weather finally edges over into proper summer heat. “And the guilt you feel over him.”

 

“Alright,” Sirius says, though it is absolutely not.

 

“You’re going to need to work on accepting two things. First, that there’s a limit to how much complicity you have in the actions of another. But second, you also need to understand that these feelings will take time to go away. To that end, it would be helpful to grieve for him. He’s gone, but you never let yourself leave him behind. Closure may be a modern concept, but it’s one with worth. It would be helpful for you to find some way to say good-bye to him.”

 

“But what if he’s not dead? If he comes back?”

 

“You’ve never said good-bye to someone who’s still living?” she asks, arching an eyebrow. “Farewells don’t need to be final to have worth or meaning. And as I said, it would help you.”

 

He takes a breath, looks out the window at the cloudless blue sky. McGonagall’s office is near enough the great lawn that he can hear the happy shouts of a group of young men who are playing a friendly game of football. He had passed them by when he was walking to her office and so he knows that most of them are in their first year, near Regulus’s age. It would only have taken a trick of the light and his own hopeful thinking for him to see his little brother there among them, calling for them to pass the ball his way.

 

He takes a tissue from the box next to the sofa, but only in anticipation of needing it. The tears, today, are not quite there.

 

“How do I say good-bye?” he asks, folding the tissue over into quarters and then eighths. “How do you even say good-bye to someone who’s not there?”

 

“I would suggest going to places where you felt close to him,” she says. “Or doing things you used to do with him. And don’t expect to have only positive feelings when you do this. You had a complicated relationship with your brother, you’re going to have complicated feelings. That’s completely okay.”

 

He nods, looks down at the puffy square he’s made of the tissue. “What if it doesn’t stick? Saying good-bye, I mean.”

 

“I don’t expect that it will,” she tells him. “You’re grieving for him – and that’s the bottom line – and the process of grieving for someone so central to your life, that never really ends. It just takes up less and less time. But only if you allow yourself to grieve fully.”

 

He nods again and takes another tissue because he thinks the tears might be coming now, although, that day, they never really do. Instead, all his eyes do is blur and burn so that he sees the sky out the window as if through a veil. The football sails by the window and the trick of the light comes, for just an instant, and he sees Regulus running, just there.

 

…

 

It becomes a strange summer: solemn and yet gorgeous, each day finer than the one before it, the weather so unusually good that there are news stories about it, sunlight falling golden through the tree branches and puddling beneath the window shades, but the air containing a certain quality of stillness to it, a note of quiet that Sirius believes is audible only to him and the others on line for lilies and funeral wreaths at the florist’s.

 

Summer has always been the season of muchness, or so Sirius has always felt. It contains the best and worst of everything life has on offer: leisure time, but also the problem of what to fill it with; blue skies, but also searing sunlight; luxuriously warm nights, but also sweat sticky sheets. This summer is no exception; it contains, in fact, even more muchness than usual.

 

The way he feels as though he’s in mourning while the weather outside is so fine is part of it, but it’s also the inch deep shadows of Grimmauld Place set against the brightness of Remus’s flat; the solitary moments of him preparing a fake grave on a day when he later cheers on James so loudly during a match his throat is sore all the next day; and it’s the closed off feel of his mother’s room after he’d spent the afternoon watching Remus nap on a patch of park grass. It’s that he never knew he could feel so sad and so happy in the span of a single day; or if he did know, he never let himself feel it so acutely.

 

When term ends he embarks on what he comes to call his Closure Tour. He begins with what he has always been taught is the proper good-bye etiquette: lilies and candles and a visit to the mausoleum. He goes alone, though both Remus and James had offered to go with him, and stands still outside the mausoleum doors for long, restless minutes reading over and over the words carved into the stone. He stares at them so long that the phenomenon in which they no longer look like real words occurs, and then he knows it’s time to step inside.

 

He’s jittery, strangely excited, and he doesn’t know why until he comes to the empty slots below his father’s coffin and feels a leaden thud of disappointment to find the one that should have been Regulus’s empty. He had been expecting, he realized, some sign that Regulus had been there: a torn off piece of drawing paper with the image on it half-visible, a cut out from a sports article regarding Regulus’s favorite football team, or even simply a flower, perhaps a hyacinth to indicate his regret. But there is nothing there but dust and a fine line of black mold near the wall, and the absence makes his breath stick in his throat and the lilies tremble in his hands. He stuffs them in to Regulus’s slot with more force than is proper, watches as a few petals spiral down onto the toes of his shoes. “You little shit,” he says, kicking the petals away. “You couldn’t stay out of trouble and you couldn’t say good-bye.”

 

He fumes out of the mausoleum, mutters, “Tonjours pur my arse,” and stops only to glance at grave he and Regulus had leaned on during their father’s funeral.

 

He’s tense and angry all afternoon, the world seemingly full of near misses and bad connections. But then after a late and unsatisfying lunch he bumps into James and Lily, who he hadn’t even been aware were nearby. They chat with him while he waits outside the map shop for Remus to close up, Lily doing an impressive job of making fun of James and faking like she doesn’t like him as much as she so clearly does. She’d do well on the cover of a bridal magazine, he thinks, and not unkindly. It’s his first pleasant thought all day.

 

Remus joins them and then the evening turns into the double date Sirius and James have been putting off since March. They’d been nervous, both of them self-aware enough to know that they can be insufferable in group settings – prone to performing and clowning, both with their need to occupy the center of attention in different ways – but the evening goes off without a hitch. It’s near perfect, in fact, a little tour of all the marvels the city has on offer: they go to an outdoor concert in the park, all four of them saying to hell with grass stains and lying flat on the lawn, eyes half-closed as the music washes over them; and when that’s done they stumble upon a street food festival, a half hour before closing, the lines down to one or two people, and the prices whittled away to half off. They had meant to go to dinner at a tapas place that Sirius and James are obsessed with, but this turns out to be much better, they all agree.

 

The night ends on a rooftop bar, the city lights fanned out below them, the gin hitting Sirius in a warm and mellow way. But his second glass, for whatever reason, staggers him, makes him break away from the group to stand near the bar’s edge, the city’s lights sparkling, but far too plentiful. There are so many places to be, he thinks. So many places to get lost, even in this one small square of Earth’s surface. Regulus might have tried to come back, but couldn’t; this thought sticks in the base of his throat, as ragged and acidic as the lime floating in his drink. It stings as much to think this as it does to believe that Regulus never even bothered to come back. Every possibility of what could have happened to Regulus hurts the same, he realizes. There’s no escaping it.

 

He throws back the drink and it goes down bitter, but before he can contemplate the sharper edges of his drunkenness James comes round to bring him his third gin and tonic. They throw the limes at each other purely out of habit and look behind them to see Remus and Lily trying out each other’s drinks. “This went well,” James says, and Sirius agrees. Plans are made for the summer ahead, the state of their drunkenness such that they’ll only remember the better ones. James throws his arm round Sirius’s shoulder and they look back out over the bar’s edge and into the night, which no longer looks so alarmingly big, but does look quite blurry. The third gin and tonic goes down clear and fizzy and when he looks through the glass Sirius feels like he’s drinking starlight.

 

Two days later he takes a train ride out to his old boarding school, wanders round the football pitch, lingers near the equipment shed, and finally takes the leap and goes inside to look at the trophy case. They’ve taken out the pictures of Regulus winning the final match the year Sirius graduated, the ones that caught him mid-kick, his right leg in a perfect arc. He had been so obviously proud of that win, and of being so prominently displayed in the trophy case, but now those photos were gone, along with the trophies that bore his name. They probably took them down the instant the news story broke, not wanting to taint their supposed good name.

 

A security guard comes round as he’s staring into the case and he’s disproportionately angry when the guard insists that he needs to show some ID. He storms off rather than say he’s an alumnus, paces the length of the train both ways back into the city, and upon disembarking is suddenly struck with inspiration about what he can make with the cilantro he’s left in Remus’s fridge. It turns out to be a lovely meal, and one that Remus will ask for often in the future, but even that night as he lies with Remus’s arm thrown over his chest he continues to feel that outsized anger. It keeps him awake that night and the next, and takes away his chances of sleep entirely on the third night when he lies with his eyes open to the ceiling in Grimmauld Place, unable to get the images of where he’d been that day out of his gaze. He’d gone to the creepy little hideout on Rosier’s property that Regulus and his friends had used to spew their vitriol and make their horrible plans. It was a disused, dilapidated cabin, the sort of place that always seemed to include a heavy gray sky above it. The graffiti and the occult altar that Sirius had seen in the pictures the detectives had shown him were gone, but the weeds that Sirius had seen in those same pictures were still there, rising up the side of the bricks, choking out better, brighter things. Though the belongings Regulus and his friends had left behind were gone it felt as though any one of them could come back at a moment’s notice, that the wind’s rustling through the nearby chain link fence could in fact be a heralding noise, the incoming sound of a boy. Strange to think of them as boys, though they would’ve been for most of the time they came here. He has to stand with that fact the way he has to stand with his anger, the both of them inescapable things.

 

This is one summer’s day that’s pure black, to say the least. He breaks a date with Remus, though he’s clear about why, and passes half the night watching the moon throw its pale light against his bedroom wall before he rises from his bed and goes into Regulus’s room. He takes another of Regulus’s trophies down from the wall, first breaks it in half and then tosses it into the library fireplace. The metal takes a long time to melt and lose its shape, but no matter. By the time it’s done the sun has started rising and his anger is ebbing. He regrets what he’s done, sees his father in the violence of it, and gathers up the ashes and larger pieces that survived, puts them in a glass bowl, and sets them by his bed. McGonagall has told him that talking aloud may help, and so he lets loose a long, rambling apology to the glass bowl, as if it was Regulus, and discovers, on the point of tears, that he hasn’t really been trying to say good-bye to him, at least not yet. He’s been looking for him, he realizes. _Actually_ looking, and expecting him to turn up round every bend. He’s been looking out for him since he disappeared, he realizes, always assuming that one day he would come back. He never let himself believe that Regulus was properly gone: that he was likely dead.

 

“I can’t believe I never considered this as a real possibility,” he tells McGonagall over the phone. It’s their first phone conversation, but her voice is as solid to him as the walls of her office.

 

“He’s so present to you,” she says to this. “You see his picture every day in your home, you dwell often on what motivated him towards his crimes, you think of him in the present tense, and what’s more you never received confirmation that he’s dead. It’s natural that you want him to be alive. He’s your brother. But it’s important to reach the point where you can accept the possibility – the very likely possibility – that he is dead. Or, at least, that he is _gone_ , whatever that may end up meaning.”

 

He nods, not remembering that she can’t see him.

 

“Take a break from this for now, Black. Clear your head. Come back to it when you’re ready.”

 

“Alright,” he says, though he keeps the bowl of blackened trophy bits by his bedside, and takes a cloth out every morning the wipe the dust from the glass.

 

He spends a quasi-restorative evening at James’ flat, watching black and white horror movies and mocking their terrible special effects. They’ve gone through three bowls of popcorn and a bag and a half of gummy worms by the time Remus gets out of work and joins them, his mouth agape at the lopsided pterodactyl puppet, its strings visible above its wings, flapping clumsily towards the hero and his best girl.

 

“People,” he says with a voice full of wonder, “used to be afraid of these kinds of films. Wow.” He leans closer to the screen and joins James and Sirius in cheering on the pterodactyl and his T. Rex sidekick; they lose in the end of course, but you can’t say they didn’t put up one hell of a fight. The next film is duller, more full of mad scientists than bad dinosaur puppetry, and James excuses himself to call Lily, who is at her parents’, struck down by a summer flu.

 

Sirius is typing a gummy worm into a knot and contemplating biting it down the middle when Remus says, “I’ve had a call from my dad.”

 

“Oh, yeah? How’s he doing?”

 

“Oh, fine, fine. He…he’d like us to come out to see him soon.”

 

Sirius nods, bites the worm, and only then does he catch the “us.”

 

“Really?” he says excitedly, his voice pitching up. And then, more seriously, he adds, “You’ve told him?”

 

Remus fidgets with the bag of gummy worms, plucks one out, and stretches it just to the point of breaking. It had always been unclear to Sirius if Remus was out to his father or not; he had asked, early on, if his father knew about them and had been told only that Mr. Lupin was aware that he was dating “someone.” “He’s happy for me,” he had said then and it had been too early to press for more than that.

 

But now, Remus says, “He, uh, knew before I told him. Figured it out, I mean.”

 

“How?”

 

“Well, I’ve been trying to ease him into the idea slowly, you know? I thought that would be best. So I never said ‘he’ or ‘him’ when I was talking about you. Anyway, a week or so ago I decided it was time to be straight with him – ha, ha, yes, yes, very funny, Sirius – and I told him that I’m, you know, dating a bloke. And he got very quiet and then he asked me, really gingerly, if I had gotten hit in the head or something recently. Now I thought he was about to become cruel but then he said, ‘Have you got amnesia? You’ve been telling me you’ve been dating a man for _months_.’ Now _I_ was confused and I asked him when I had done that, because I certainly didn’t remember saying it clearly. Quite the contrary, as I’ve said. But what had happened was that instead of saying ‘he’ or ‘him’ I always just said ‘Sirius.’ Now this whole time I always thought your name was unisex –”

 

“You _what_?” Sirius bursts out, struggling to hold back a laugh.

 

“But,” Remus goes on, his cheeks flushing, “apparently not.”

 

“Let me get this straight: you went through all the trouble of avoiding my gender –”

 

“Yes, I know, it’s ridiculous.”

 

“—For all of these months –”

 

“Alright, alright.”

 

“—Only to discover—”

 

“I think you’ll burst a blood vessel if you don’t get that laugh over with.”

 

“—That he knew the whole time!”

 

“Ha, ha,” Remus says drily, and then genuinely as Sirius bends double, wheezing.

 

“You’re normally so clever!” Sirius bursts out, between laughs.

 

“Yeah, well. Can’t be perfect all the time, I suppose.”

 

Sirius lets out another wheezing laugh then says, “Here, here, I’m sorry. Look, have my worm.”

 

With a snort, Remus accepts Sirius’s tied up gummy worm, and hands him the one he’s stretched out a bit. As Remus chews on his gummy Sirius considers the elongated worm.

 

“Have you ever seen that movie with the two dogs and the spaghetti?” he says, and Remus, glancing down at the worm, laughs.

 

“Alright,” he says. “Even though you’ve just made fun of me for something just as silly.”

 

But before they can do more than take an end of the gummy in their mouths James bursts in and shouts, “There’s to be no soppiness or romantic reenactments in my flat while my girlfriend is sick, do you hear me?”

 

This naturally ensures that they continue towards each other from either side of the gummy, and that the kiss is held far longer than they normally would’ve done. It’s sloppy, sugary, and punctuated by James’s noises of protest to Lily, whose laughter is audible through the speaker, and is also, somehow, perfect.

 

You cannot, Sirius thinks when they finally break apart and gather napkins to wipe the spit from each other’s chins, do something like that with just anyone. Or rather you could, but it wouldn’t be nearly as nice.

 

James slumps down on the back of the couch, defeated and whining to Lily, and holds his hand out for some gummy worms of his own.

 

…

 

They leave to see Remus’s father that weekend, taking the train two hours to Remus’s hometown. It is a very different ride than the one they would take if Sirius were to ever introduce Remus to his mother: that would be a ride replete with warnings, a list of topics not to bring up, of comments that would be likely to be received and how best to respond to them, of what to do if she suddenly couldn’t remember his name or what they had been in the middle of discussing. On the train Remus offers no insight into his father except to repeat what he had before: that he ran a newsagent’s stand, hiked every Saturday, and always set out a plate of greens for the wild rabbits that wandered close to his garden.

 

“Don’t be nervous,” Remus adds, as though Sirius can help it. “He’s not like me. He doesn’t bite.”

 

Sirius laughs, but he remains nervous nevertheless. He’s thinking about his hair (should he have cut it just for this first meeting?), his clothes (should he have dressed up? Worn a tie?), and the wine he’d brought (should he have spent less? More?) up until the very minute the train pulls into their stop. He gets all the bags except the one Remus won’t let him take – he knows to do that at least – and steps onto the platform.

 

He spots Remus’s father immediately, and even without ever having seen a picture knows at once that it’s him. He looks like a faded copy of Remus, the only difference being the color of his eyes and the shape of his smile. He stands when he sees Remus and gives him the shy, shocked look that Sirius sometimes catches Mr. Potter giving James: _My God,_ that look says _, how did you grow up so fast? Weren’t you just a boy?_

 

There’s a slight moment of awkwardness when Mr. Lupin goes to give Remus a hug just as Remus is sticking out his hand; they look at each other for a beat with twin expressions of surprise, and then Remus drops his hand and throws an arm around his father.

 

“Good to see you, lad,” Mr. Lupin says, his tone coarse to cover the emotion in his voice. It’s been almost a year since Remus has been home, and the time has obviously taken its toll.

 

“Yeah, you as well,” Remus replies, eyes shining, and then steps back and introduces Sirius.

 

Sirius’s nerves vanish the moment he takes Mr. Lupin’s hand. He has a gentle grip and there’s no scrutiny in his gaze as he looks Sirius over, just a sort of polite curiosity. He corrects Sirius when he calls him Mr. Lupin, saying, “It’s Lyall, please. No one but the substitute mailwoman calls me Mr. Lupin.”

 

Lyall, then, leads them to his little car and begins querying them about what they’d like for dinner. “The fridge has gone off,” he informs them. “The handyman, Fletcher – Mundungus, he was a classmate of Remus’s in primary school – well he keeps saying he’ll come round and he never does. It’s for the best, I suppose, since it forced me to eat those fruitcakes I’ve had in the icebox since the earth was new, only now I’ve got nothing to feed you lot. There’s a pizza restaurant that delivers,” he says brightly, and with hope. “Or there’s Chinese or Indian.”

Remus flashes Sirius a glance then says, “Pizza’s fine, Dad.”

 

“Oh, well. If that’s what you’d like,” Lyall says breezily, but Sirius can see him smiling in the rearview mirror.

 

They pull up in front of the Lupin’s cottage, a worn, but well-cared for place. It puts Sirius immediately in mind of Remus’s flat – not because it’s small, although it is – but because of the way it’s organized and decorated. The cups and dishes are put away with the same orderliness in the cottage as they are in Remus’s kitchen, and there’s hardly any space for anything on any of the sitting room shelves with all the books in the way. The house is brighter than Remus’s flat – the walls painted cheery yellows and greens, with alternatively funky and antique lamps crowding every surface – but Sirius figures that’s down more to the limits of Remus’s lease than his actual taste.

 

“Well,” Lyall says to Remus when they step inside, “you’ve got a bit of a pickle to figure out I suppose.” He gives Sirius a significant nod and then makes a show of going into the kitchen to get the pizza restaurant’s takeaway menu.

 

Sirius, who feels as though he must have missed some secret exchange between father and son, looks at Remus, who seems caught between embarrassment and laughter.

 

“He wants us to figure out the sleeping arrangements,” he tells Sirius. “We’ll either be together in my room, and you’ll be on a camp bed that’s roughly as comfortable as a pile of rocks. Or you’ll be alone down here on the pullout which is much more comfortable. It’s too low for me when it’s a bed,” he adds apologetically. “Hurts my leg.”

 

“Oh. Well, the camp bed’s fine.”

 

“You’re certain?”

 

“Miss a night in your childhood bedroom? What do I look like?”

 

Remus snorts. “Alright. Dad! We’ll take the camp bed.”

 

Lyall sticks his head out of the kitchen and looks at Sirius. “He’s warned you about the camp bed’s eerie similarity to sleeping on rubble, I hope?”

 

“He did, but I don’t mind.”

 

“Alright,” Lyall says with a shrug, heading off in the direction of the stairs. “You’re entitled to your own judgments, of course. Both of you are. Though hopefully those judgments will involve remembering that the walls of this house are thin and that I get up rather early in the morning.”

 

With that, he heads up the stairs, leaving Remus blushing. Judging from how deep the red on Remus’s cheeks is, Sirius figures that this is the closest Lyall has ever come to giving Remus the sex talk.

 

“Oh my God,” Remus mutters. “That was mortifying.”

 

“Oh, please,” Sirius says, taking the opportunity to snoop through the books they keep on the mantle. “My father once left a magazine of French pornography on the dining table. He did it purely to annoy my mother, but still.”

 

“Good Lord,” Remus says as comes over to join Sirius by the mantle. They compare and contrast how much they liked or disliked various titles, the squeaks of the camp bed being pushed into Remus’s bedroom above them, until Sirius spies a line of tarnished silver between two piles of books. He pulls it out and sees that it’s a picture frame holding the image of a woman with honey blonde hair standing in a field, a hulking mountain far behind her. There, he sees, are Remus’s eyes, and the exact shape of Remus’s smile.

 

“Yes,” Remus says, taking the picture frame carefully from Sirius and looking at it a moment before stretching to set it atop one of the book piles. “It must have fallen. It belongs here. These were all her favorites.”

 

Sirius scans the titles and sees a poet that both he and Remus love, a classic author that he has never read but that Remus has professed to dislike, and three sci-fi books that, to his surprise, Remus says he has always adored. “She had eclectic taste,” Remus says with a hint of pride, as Lyall comes back down the stairs and announces he’d like to order the pizza.

 

The pizza isn’t very good – it comes from a chain, in fact, one that prides itself more on its price than its taste – but Sirius finds it sweet the way Lyall treats the delivery and eating of the pizza like an event. He sets out real plates, carefully doles out the slices and the garlic knots, and pours soda into long-stemmed wine glasses. And then, to Sirius’s delight, he begins to betray all of Remus’s childhood confidences and foibles.

 

“You used to call pizza ‘pita’ didn’t you, Remus?”

 

“No, I don’t think I –”

 

“Oh, you most certainly did. Don’t you remember that time we were at that food court in the mall near your auntie’s?” Turning to Sirius he says, “He tried to order pizza from the Italian place, only, naturally, the woman behind the counter got confused and directed him to the Greek restaurant round the corner. He was very upset.”

 

“I wasn’t _that_ upset.”

 

“Oh, well, you know, Remus, you were six. Everything upset you then. Cars honking, broccoli, butterflies –”

 

“Butterflies?” interjects Sirius.

 

Lyall nods. “He saw this tropical butterfly in a book, and when we told him that we didn’t get that kind around here, oh he lost his head. Absolutely devastated. ‘Course you know how tender-hearted he is. He just wanted to give one a pet.”

 

“ _Dad_.”

 

“Are you tender-hearted?” Sirius asks gleefully. “I wasn’t aware you’re tender-hearted.”

 

“’Course he is,” Lyall says, a touch defensively. “Deep down anyway.”

 

“Am I not here?” Remus asks, extremely defensively. “Do I not get to defend myself against these accusations?” He points his finger in Lyall’s face. “I never cried over a butterfly.”

 

Lyall shrugs. “If you say so.” And then, very lightly, in the precise tone of voice Remus uses whenever he knows he is about to win an argument says, “We can double check the photo albums later to be sure.”

 

Remus blanches, and Sirius, unable to help himself, claps his hands delightedly.

 

After dinner, when the photo album in question comes out, and Remus continues muttering denials under his breath, Sirius bears witness to the quality of scoldings he must have received as a child. Looking him straight in the eye Lyall says, “Now, Remus, is this any way to behave? You’ve brought Sirius all the way out here and you won’t let him see any of your pictures?” He clicks his tongue a bit, shakes his head, and in the time it takes him to do that Remus mutters an apology and lets the photo album open without complaint.

 

 _How quick that was_ , Sirius thinks, _and how bloodless. And yet also how completely effective it was in – oh my God that’s baby Remus!_

 

“Baby Remus!” Sirius garbles out, the sight of one-year-old Remus with blond (!) hair and cake mashed all over his face blotting out all other thought.

 

The next half hour is essentially a series of unbridled enjoyment: this particular photo album contains pictures of Remus from ages one to seven, so it’s essentially all birthdays and sunny family outings and chubby cheeks. There are, in fact, many pictures of Remus crying, and one where he is clearly crying over the pages of a butterfly book, and Sirius admires Lyall’s restraint when they come to it: “There you go,” he says decisively, but nothing more than that. Remus grumbles another apology and they move further along into the album. All of the pictures are adorable and affecting to Sirius, but the pictures that arrest him most are the ones where Remus is beginning to near seven and is starting to look like the Remus he knows, his hair darkening, the ever present thoughtfulness in his gaze. Seeing pictures of Remus as a boy is strangely like meeting him all over again; he sees him with fresh eyes, each feature almost new. There are differences of course – the scars are not there yet, and neither are the full arch of his eyebrows – but the way he feels about him is the same.

 

Among the pictures of Remus are also pictures of his mother; “Hopey,” Lyall calls her, bittersweetness in his voice. He and Remus point her out whenever she’s in the shot with Remus, recalling details of this or that particular memory. But whenever she’s in a picture alone they only pause to look at her before moving on. Sirius can understand that from all the times he’s had to look at portraits of his father or Regulus. There’s too much in a single image of someone who’s gone to parse into language; it would take far more than a thousand words to articulate even the smallest detail of their being. Easier, by far, to simply look and try to remember what they did or said rather than who they were.

 

Near the end of the album though, Remus pauses over a picture of his mother reading in an armchair, her legs tucked beneath her, her lips slightly parted. Sirius figures she must be mouthing the words of whatever she’s reading, the way Remus does whenever he gets particularly sucked into a book.

 

“Can I have this one?” Remus asks, his fingers already straying towards the edges.

 

“Well, of course,” Lyall says, though he looks the picture over before he says it, and smiles sadly.

 

After they put the album away and Lyall says he’s heading to bed Remus puts the picture carefully into his bag, tucking it between the pages of the book he’s brought with him. He resituates the book several times in his bag before he’s satisfied and then he calls to Sirius, “Are you done snooping yet?”

 

Remus’s room is a goldmine, an intricate and varied look into the history of one Remus J. Lupin, and so no he is not done snooping and probably wouldn’t be done snooping for hours, but he can see the tender expression on Remus’s face so he sets aside the Beastie Boys CD (!) he’s holding and joins him on the bed. The bedspread is a sedate blue and is soft between his fingers when he reaches for Remus. Remus’s hand is balled into a fist, his knuckles gone white, but he uncurls his fingers for Sirius and squeezes his hand back, tightly.

 

They sit like that for a minute, Remus carefully easing himself to the side so that he can lean his head on Sirius’s shoulder, and then, after a slight sigh, Remus says, “Sometimes I can’t believe she’s really gone.”

 

“I know that feeling,” Sirius says, rubbing circles on the small of Remus’s back.

 

“I did think it would be sadder being here, though. That’s why I kept putting this off.”

 

“Are you not sad?” Sirius asks softly, his nose brushing against the hair above Remus’s temple.

 

“Not any more than I usually am about her. And in a way…almost less. I don’t know. Being here, it’s like feeling like she’s only just stepped out. Not in a creepy way, or a delusional way, more like I feel closer to her here. Sometimes in the city I feel close to her too, but it’s stronger here.”

 

“A house holds onto things,” Sirius says, thinking of Grimmauld Place, the narrow hallways, the locked doors. So different from this house with its cozy cheer and brightness, and yet in essence the same, the way all houses were the same: repositories of the lives lived in them, shaped not just by beams or windows but by the force of personalities and experiences had within them. He pictures Remus’s sitting room – its hand-stitched curtains and its piles of books – against the the austere rooms in his own home and knows why Remus is able to heave a bittersweet sigh and savor his memories and why he himself is incapable of doing so. Neither of their houses will let them go, but their holds are very different from each other, because their families are very different from each other.

 

“Yes,” Remus agrees, and he shifts his head to look up at Sirius.

 

Sirius kisses his temple, smiles at him, is quiet for a moment, and then cannot resist asking, “When you’re in the city…how do you let yourself feel close to her?”

 

Remus makes a humming noise in the back of his throat. He must have expected this question, but he’s taking his time in order to answer it fully. He keeps his head on Sirius’s shoulder and runs his thumb up and down along the back of Sirius’s hand.

 

“It’s little things,” he says after a moment. “I buy her favorite type of tea, even though I don’t much care for green tea. I keep it in the cupboard and every time I open it up it’s…it’s just nice to see it. She’d like that I keep another option besides Earl Grey in case whatever company I have over doesn’t care for that, so it’s sort of honoring her in that way as well. And then I have it sometimes and I remember why I don’t like it, which makes me remember conversations we used to have about why I don’t like it – it’s too bitter for me – and I know it’s awfully mundane, but that’s the stuff of life, you know? So I buy her tea and her favorite biscuits and sometimes I go into a department store and ask them to give me a sample of her perfume. And I have all these things around me and – and I know she’s not _there_ , but she feels more present. Or rather, I guess my memories of her are clearer. It’s nice. It hurts, but it’s nice.”

 

“Bittersweet,” Sirius whispers, voicing the word that’s been on his mind all evening.

 

“Very,” Remus says with a laugh, nuzzling his nose into Sirius’s upper arm. “I’ve talked about it a lot with Alice.” He glances up at Sirius then begins to ask, “Have you…”

 

“It’s more difficult for me. But I’ve talked about it with McGonagall, yeah.”

 

Remus nods. He knows that Sirius is trying to find a way to say good-bye to Regulus, but he doesn’t know the extent to which he’s failed in doing so.

 

“You’ll find a way,” he says. “Sooner or later.”

 

Sirius nods and gives Remus a kiss. It’s a slow, comforting kiss of the sort they’ve perfected recently, and Remus smiles into it and strokes Sirius’s hair. They lie down on Remus’s bed and kiss without urgency until they both become too sleepy to hold their kisses for more than a few seconds.

 

Sirius settles himself onto the camp bed after Remus undresses: it is, as promised, quite rocklike but it doesn’t matter. The discomfort focuses his thoughts down the particular corridors and hallways he needs them to go. Though he’s awake and alert for a long time he only makes a detour once, to wonder about the house he and Remus will have someday, and whether it will be as bright as this one.

 

…

 

The following afternoon Sirius insists they go to the market; he wants to make them dinner.

 

“But there’s Chinese or Indian still,” Lyall says, baffled.

 

“He wants to do it, Dad,” Remus says. “Let him.”

 

“Alright,” Lyall says, clearly full of misgivings at the prospect of having to head to the market on a Sunday. But still he drives them and makes small talk with one of the clerks while Sirius goes around the well-stocked shop to get what he needs.

 

Back at the house Sirius prepares grilled pork chops with nectarine salsa and stuffed bell peppers. He serves it with the wine he brought and Lyall coos over how good everything is for half the meal. “Alright, Dad,” Remus finally says with a little smile. “His head is big enough already.”

 

They’d gotten a store bought cake for dessert at Lyall’s insistence; in this heat, without a fridge, there was no point in trying to keep any kind of ice cream or sweet delicacy, he said. It’s a blueberry crumb cake and it’s not bad; in fact it goes rather well with the wine. Lyall and Sirius are just remarking on this fact when Remus clears his throat and gives his glass a little tap.

 

“So I wanted to tell you both together,” he says. “I’ve, um, I’ve made a bit of a decision.” He clears his throat, takes another sip of wine, and goes on. “I’ve asked Mr. Breems if I can start working at the shop part-time, so that I can go back to school. I applied and got into the art history department at Sirius’s university so –”

 

Sirius lets out an inarticulate yelp, bounds to his feet, and gathers Remus into a hug. “Oh my God, congratulations! Why the hell didn’t you tell me you’d applied? Art history, that’s fantastic, I’m so bloody happy for you!” At the end of this rambling Sirius kisses Remus full on the mouth, heedless of the fact that Lyall is watching. He can’t help it; he knows how big a deal this is for Remus. So much of how he feels about himself is negative and lacking in self-worth. For him to apply to university would not only mean that he was ready to go back to school, but that he thought he was good enough to attend university again. Sirius had had some inklings that he might be applying – he had been asking more pointed questions about the curriculum lately, and had requested a little tour of the campus when he met Sirius on the last day of term – but he didn’t think it would be this soon.

 

Remus is blushing, partly from the thrill of his announcement and partly from the kiss. Lyall clears his throat.

 

“Art history?” he probes gently. “And, um, how – how much –”

 

“I’ve got a scholarship,” Remus says, a grin breaking out so fully onto his face that Sirius can’t help but given him another hug. “I applied for that as well, and didn’t really think I’d get it, but I did, and now it won’t cost hardly anything at all. I know it’ll be a lot of work getting back into school,” he goes on, “but I’m really looking forward to it.”

 

“Well, alright,” Lyall says, with the cautiousness of a parent who has seen his child disappointed before. He clears his throat, takes a breath to appreciate how momentous this is, and goes on, more brightly, “I’m proud of you. That’s not an easy school to get into.”

 

“He’s going to do brilliantly,” Sirius says, beaming. “God, I wish we could get you into a class with me, James, and Snape. We’ve been dying to hear you tear his arguments to shreds.”

 

Remus blushes more under this praise, and begins to talk about the courses he’d like to take and the internships he’s already looking at. They take their wine into the garden to watch the tail end of the sunset, Remus and Sirius debating the merits of one particular museum’s internship opportunities. They sit together on the little bench the Lupins have set up in their yard, and Remus, so full of good cheer, unthinkingly throws his arm around Sirius’s shoulder and kisses his cheek. Sirius sees Lyall sneak a glance at them, and then smile to himself as he kneels in the grass, a plate of leftover salad in his hands.

 

He sets the plate into the grass and comes back to stand beside them, listening to them talk about all the museums and galleries Remus would like to intern at. They’ve only been talking for a few minutes when a rabbit comes bounding out of the twilight. It comes to a stop at the plate and looks suspiciously up at Remus and Sirius before pulling off a lettuce leaf with its paw and then bending its head to munch on it.

 

“Who’s this then?” Remus asks Lyall, nodding his chin at the rabbit.

 

“Delilah, looks like,” Lyall says, taking out a pair of reading glasses and holding them to his eyes. “Yep. Delilah. And here comes Miranda and Madame Roquefort.” He holds up a hand, indicating two more rabbits; one of them is quite ample and is obviously the Madame.

 

“You give them names?” Sirius asks, charmed yet again by Lyall.

 

“Oh, sure. When they come round often enough. Oh, and here’s Tiger. How are ya, lad?”

 

Tiger is indistinguishable from the other two small rabbits in color or build, but Sirius can see why Lyall had given him the name he had: this rabbit is far bolder than the others, pulling the biggest pieces of lettuce off the plate, his tail held high. He also seems to not be fussed by the unusual appearance of Remus and Sirius in the garden, and goes so far as to wander over to get a better look at them.

 

Lyall dangles his hand down, a baby carrot sticking out from between his fingers. Tiger spares Remus and Sirius but a second’s glance before hopping over to Lyall and nosing against his hand for the carrot. He eats it in a few loud bites and then bends his head for Lyall to give him a pat.

 

“See here,” Lyall says to them, his fingers fluffing up the fur on the rabbit’s head, “now you’ve met _my_ boyfriend.”

 

Remus makes a surprised little noise, but Sirius just laughs. “You make a lovely couple,” he says.

 

“Course we do,” Lyall says, going into his pocket for another carrot. Sneaking a glance their way as he feeds Tiger he adds, “You two do as well.”

 

Lyall had hardly seemed opposed to Sirius – he had been, in fact, nicer to him than most of his girlfriends’ fathers had been – but Sirius can still tell that Remus is grateful to have his approval, even more so when Lyall adds, “Hopey would think so too.”

 

The long twilight fades away with its usual summertime grace, and the moths flutter over to land on the Lupins’ windows, peering in at all the brightly burning lamps. The stars come out above them and the rabbits hop away into the velvet dark of the surrounding trees. Tiger goes last, tail high and bounding, and he vanishes out of view as suddenly as a wink. Lyall wipes his hands on his trousers and gets to his feet after he goes, bids them good-night, and tells them he’ll be making breakfast before their train in the morning.

They stay outside a while longer, soaking in the balmy night air and the warmth of each other’s skin. Sirius’s thoughts are bounding around like Lyall’s rabbits, running over everything: how well he’s hit it off with Lyall, Remus’s decision to go back to school, the lingering taste of the blueberry cake, Hope’s picture lovingly tucked into Remus’s book, and even Regulus, in a strange, oblique way. When a crescent moon begins to rise above the treetops, throwing a silver aura above their darkness, he reins his running thoughts in, feeling Remus’s head growing heavy on his shoulder. Remus twitches awake, mumbles something about the train, and Sirius helps him to his feet.

 

“You know,” he says, just before they go back inside, as he stands on the threshold, taking one last look into the beautiful night. “We really ought to come here more often.”

 

“Yes. Yes, I agree,” Remus says, just before he yawns prodigiously, and they go inside, upstairs, and to bed.

 

…

 

The first day back in the city that he stays in Grimmauld Place he doesn’t even think, he just goes straight to the dining room. He pulls the shades up to let the light in and sits in his usual seat, his fingers steepled in front of him, his entire posture held in a gesture of waiting. He sits there for an hour, then stands, closes the blinds, and resumes his day. He goes with Remus to the university bookshop, helps him pick out his books, and they take a ride out to Lily’s neighborhood, and meet up with her and James. It’s another night where he feels the tremble of a sob caught between his laughs, but the next day, once the hangover wears off, he’s back at the dining room table, the sunlight full in his face, upright in his chair and waiting.

 

He’d expected to be waiting for a while; a week at least. But in the last ten minutes of the hour on the second day, it occurs to him that the richly brown grains of the mahogany table before him were once part of a tree. The polish of it was once rough bark, and its neat rectangle edges were once a sprawl of branches. He sees the image in his mind – a new, strange sapling growing up out of the varnish – only seconds before he reaches to his left, where he’s set his sketchpad and pencils.

 

He draws a little tree growing up out of the tabletop, and this image leads him to another and another and another, until he has a whole catalog of slightly strange dining room related things: a wineglass with a hairline fracture and liquid in it the color of sunlight, a centerpiece of orchids adrift at sea, a row of forks with tines made of fire, and a place card, as if for a party, done in his best calligraphy, set out for Death Itself. With each pencil stroke he can feel himself approaching something. It’s as though he’s on a train heading through familiar terrain, and though his attention is elsewhere, away from the scenery that passes as he draws nearer to his destination, he can still feel how close he is to being there, how soon the train will stop and he will be welcomed off it. It is an odd feeling, something that he knows he is, at least in part, manufacturing himself, but it is a feeling with weight nevertheless. As he draws nearer to it he can almost see before him a hand gripping a pencil like his, only the hand is paler, the nails shorter, and there is the faintest freckle on the back of the wrist. Regulus’s wrist. Regulus’s hand.

 

And there, for an instant, pencil flying, deep in thought, Sirius can almost feel him entering the room and sitting across the table from him.

 

He stops only when the light leaves, rising from his daze to find his eyes watery and his hand aching. He sets his pencils aside and closes the sketchbook, but he does not get up to leave right away. Instead he sits there, his head bowed, his feet curled beneath his seat. Across the table is Regulus, his slight breathing, the rustling of his pencil across his own sketchpad. He stays a long time, for as long as Sirius can hold the image of him, as he was, as he could have been; but when Sirius at last looks up, the space in front of him is empty, and Regulus has long since gone.

 

…

 

He takes to drawing every day, whenever he can, wherever he is. The dining room is best at first, but soon the other rooms in Grimmauld Place work just as well for conjuring up the sense that Regulus is with him. He goes to the attic, draws creatures made of smoke – birds, mostly – in honor of the joints they smoked, and in his own room he draws books breaking out of shelves, flying off into sunsets, and transforming, like the dining room table, into trees. He knows it’s all just a metaphor for escape even before he talks to McGonagall, but he’s been thinking and drawing stuff like this for long before Regulus ever ran away. They had both deserved a chance to break free, to fly away from this place, or at least a way to transform themselves into something better. He has always known that on some level, and he imagines Regulus did too. He thinks that has to be at least one reason why Regulus did what he did, and though it is no salve and no excuse, it does help Sirius to get closer to understanding.

 

The pencils whittle away into nubs, the watercolors run dry, the markers bleed out, and he buys more. He’s never had a preference for medium; he lets the colors soak through to the next page and makes the stains work with whatever his next idea is. Just as it is in the rest of his life he hardly knows what he’ll do next, it just comes to him, and he follows each idea out until the image is complete or he gets bored with it or the pencil breaks. He begins to keep a pencil on him at all times, so he can roll it between his fingers in lieu of the cigarettes he’s trying to give up, and because he figures if he has it the images will also come to him when he’s out of Grimmauld Place.

 

He figures correctly. In the hallway outside McGonagall’s office, in the café across from Remus’s job where he waits for him to get out of work, in James’s flat, and in the parks he takes his walks through, the ideas come to him. Sometimes he just takes a second to scribble an outline he might come back to later, sometimes he sits and draws the whole thing, but now no matter where he is he can feel that sense of approach, that almost noise, the illusion of Regulus’s nearness.

 

There are times he feels this more keenly than others, when he feels he could speak aloud to him and be heard. Mainly this happens to him in Grimmauld Place, but a few times it’s happened in Remus’s flat, while Remus reads on the bed and he sits hunched over the kitchen table. When this happens he can feel the words welling up on his tongue, all the things he might’ve said or should’ve said, things that have come to him far too late, and the guilt rises up in him too, pounding like a second heartbeat. The drawing is left half-finished, and the words go unspoken, and he feels, again, that he has somehow failed his brother. But then he takes the pencil in hand again and turns to a new page, and what he draws there is full of all he cannot say: the anger and the anguish, but above all else, an apology. Bruise colors smoothed over into rivers, broken bones knit together with lightning, campfire smoke caught in embraces, baggies filled with drawing pencils instead of cocaine, and skulls, perfectly anatomically correct down to the cream color of the bones, but crowned with wreaths of antlers and flowers, amethysts and pale seashells. The skulls become his habit, and the crowns they wear become more complicated and less precious – he weaves into them pill bottles and broken glass, torn damask and family photographs – but are no less beautiful and arresting.

 

He becomes so caught up in his drawing that he never notices when Remus comes to sit behind him with a sketchpad of his own. He’s too caught up in the feeling he has of Regulus being near, a deeper quiet in the already still flat. He feels himself near to being able to let him go, but he pushes it off every time. He has drawn for Regulus so many apologies and practically all of his raging, but something still feels incomplete and he doesn’t know what. He talks about it with McGonagall and she advises him to keep going, that if he feels he is near to a break through that’s because he is.

 

But just as he finds himself on the brink of healing – naturally, he should have expected this – his family intervenes in him again.

They arrive at Remus’s flat after a visit to Remus’s favorite museum, groceries in hand but the final decision for dinner not yet made. It’s a perfect mid-August evening, balmy but with that little bite to it, the reminder that autumn will return and soon. It feels less like a day to cook chicken a la king – though those are the ingredients they’ve bought – and more like a day to abscond to the countryside, and to take a long weekend at Alphard’s cottage.

 

Sirius is halfway through convincing Remus – who is proving much more malleable than usual, leaning back his neck for every kiss though they’re still in the hallway – when they come into the flat and find someone already sitting on the edge of the bed. They skid to a halt, their arms still locked around each other, Remus’s hand still in his hair, and Sirius experiences the profoundly curious sensation of feeling his blood run cold and boil at the same time.

 

“Oh, you’re back,” Bellatrix says, crossing and then delicately uncrossing her legs. She’s wearing a deceptively simple black dress, which reveals itself, when the light hits it, to be sewn through with silver. The dainty sandals she’s wearing have what Sirius knows to be real rubies sewn onto the straps, and heels long and pointed enough to double as knives. “I thought you’d never get here.” She briefly drops her attention to something on her knees and Sirius sees that she has the previous occupant’s records piled up before her. He is even more furious now that she would dare to touch any of Remus’s things, but before he can so much as breathe a growl in her direction Remus gets there first.

 

“What the hell are you doing in my house? And what the devil makes you think you can just go through my things?” Remus exclaims, his voice louder and sharper than Sirius has ever heard it. Remus knows who she is, of course; Sirius had shown him a picture of her shortly after the night in the hotel, so that he wouldn’t be blindsided if she happened to accost him while he was alone. Sirius has always dreaded something like that happening to Remus on the street or in the map shop, but now he realizes that he should’ve anticipated her coming here instead.

 

She smiles at Remus’s outburst and Sirius feels that they’re already giving her what she wants. She flicks her gaze from Remus to Sirius and says, “Oh, cousin, is _this_ really what you go for?”

 

Sirius grinds his teeth, but manages to say, “Answer his question: what are you doing here?”

 

“Well, you wouldn’t come to my house, and you barred me from entering your mother’s, so you see I had no other recourse,” she answers smoothly.

 

“Is the world made up of only houses?” Remus exclaims. “Have you never heard of a café? Or a park? Or the fact that breaking and entering is _illegal_?”

 

Sirius puts his hand on Remus’s shoulder, which is near vibrating with outraged; he’s shocked to find himself the calmer one in this situation.

 

“So I drove you to it is what you’re saying,” Sirius says, letting his voice match hers in its smoothness.

 

“I’m so glad you’ve finally learned to catch on quickly.”

 

“I mean, that’s a load of bollocks but for the sake of getting you out of here I’m not going to dwell. I expect you’ve come to settle up?”

 

“Oh!” she says, clutching her chest as if wounded. “Straight to the point with no foreplay? If you’re always like this,” she says, flicking her gaze to Remus, “then no wonder your boyfriend walks so crookedly.”

 

Black swarms Sirius’s vision, and he feels on his tongue a cutting barb worthy of his mother, and he feels in his fists the violence of his father, and all the attendant darkness of his family in every place in between. But in his ears he hears, softly, the voices of McGonagall and Remus: her steeliness and calm, his levity and love, and both of their support and their strength. He allows himself a moment to take a deep breath, and then, when he tries to make his way through all these competing elements he finds himself beneath.

 

He takes a step between Bellatrix and Remus, and clenches his fist only to yank the records out of her hands.

 

“I’m sorry for you, Bella,” he says, with heat but no venom. “I really am. If only you’d been loved by one person in your sad, miserable life you wouldn’t have to spend all your time going around making others feel bad so you can have one fucking second where you don’t feel like the shittiest person in the room.”

 

“Don’t presume to know me, cousin.”

 

“I don’t have to know you. I _was_ you. Abusive father, spiteful mother, and siblings you resent and compete with more than you can love. More’s the pity for you since at least one of your sisters is sane. Oh, and lets not even get going on your love life. Rodolphus is only interested in the sons you might have for him, and Riddle only cares for your pedigree and how easily you can get him into the drawing rooms of the families he so desperately wants to be a part of. Joke’s on him, eh? But you go ahead, Bella, you tell yourself I’m wrong, you tell yourself he’s different, he’s brilliant, he loves you. But any fool that wants to be a part of our family isn’t all that different from us. He’s exactly the same kind of cruel, status obsessed man as our fathers – only in a cheaper suit.”

 

She’s up off the bed in an instant, and she slaps him once across the face, backhanded so her rings cut open his skin. He lets his head fly to the left and hears Remus gasp and take a few steps forward, but he holds up his hand to stop him coming any closer. He looks back at Bellatrix and uses his thumb to wipe away the blood pooling on his chin.

 

“Are you done?” he asks her. “Or would you like to show off some more of your good breeding?”

 

“We’re posting the photographs online tomorrow,” she snarls at him, her immaculate chignon coming undone with the ferocity of how she gestures her chin at him.

 

“Unless?”

 

“Unless we get half,” she says, and the triumph is back in her voice. “Half of your entire estate.”

 

He feels the audacity of this ricochet through him. Half of everything he owns entails a disgusting sum of money, several houses and flats around the world, quite a few cars, multiple stock options, various antiques, ownership of a few minor corporations – and this, again, is only half.

 

He glances at Remus, who looks outraged, although not quite to the extent that he was when they had first come in to find Bellatrix there. As galling as it was, it was not nearly as galling as all the other things she’s done. It was always going to come down to money in the end; that’s what disputes between different branches of the family tended to do. That she was bold enough to ask for half made no real difference. Even if he lived to be a hundred and ten he’d be hard pressed to spend all that money. It wouldn’t matter if he lost it so long as he has Remus – and so long as she stays out of his life.

 

“And for this sum I receive, what? The negatives?” he asks. “That won’t do.”

 

She’s been playing the game for longer than he has; she knows what he wants on the table.

 

“A ceasefire in addition then?” she says.

 

“A cease and desist, more like. I don’t ever want to hear or see from you again, Bellatrix. You, or that arsehole Riddle.”

 

She smiles coolly at him. “That can be arranged.”

 

“I want it in writing. And with penalties attached.”

 

She considers this for a second and then nods. “Done. I’ll have a contract drawn up and sent on Monday.”

 

Sirius nods. “And if those pictures appear anywhere before then, Bella, I’m warning you, I’ll sue you within an inch of your life.”

 

“Oh, please, cousin,” she says, smoothing her dress and preparing to leave. “As if you’d ever be able to trace them back to me.”

 

She swings the door open and slams it shut, so that the window glass rattles in its frame and the crack on the ceiling stretches out another inch. Remus gapes at the doorknob, still trembling in her wake, and unleashes a stream of curses entirely unfit for print. Sirius meanwhile, feels his strength deflating, and sinks into a chair at Remus’s kitchen table. He dabs at his chin, which has already stopped bleeding, and lets out a deep, shuddering sigh. He looks up at Remus and asks, “Are you okay with this? I know you didn’t want to solve this with money, but –”

 

“Am _I_ okay with it? It’s your money. It’s a lot of money. And you’re giving it to _her_.” He’s speaking quickly, in short staccato bursts. Sirius has never seen him this worked up and he holds a hand out to him so that he’ll come to the table.

 

“Hey,” he says calmingly, when Remus is near enough that he can take his hand, “are you okay with this?”

 

It’s Remus turn to run a hand over his face. “Oh God, I guess. I just…I just hate the thought that she’s getting away with this. She _blackmailed_ you. Maybe…maybe we should just let her post the pictures.”

 

Sirius shakes his head. “You know they’ll be up forever if we do. There’ll be no getting away from it. It’s better, I think, just to be done with it. Let’s put it behind us.”

 

Remus gives him a hesitant look. “I feel so badly though. All your money –”

 

“Not all my money, just half. And if you feel so badly,” he says, pulling Remus closer so he can get his arms around his waist, “then you can come to the cottage with me this weekend.”

 

Remus lets out an exasperated sigh. “Be serious.”

 

“What do you mean?” Sirius asks with a full-bodied grin, pleased that Remus has finally fallen into this trap. “I can’t be anyone else. I’m always Sirius.”

 

“Alright, alright.”

 

“No, but who did you think you were talking to? Did you have me confused with Unsirius?”

 

Remus, heaving another sigh, bends to give Sirius a kiss to shut him up. “You’d just keep going if I didn’t stop you, wouldn’t you?”

 

“Oh, for days,” Sirius says gleefully and sneaks in another kiss before Remus can straighten and take the other seat at the table.

 

They sit together in silence for a few minutes, holding hands beneath the table, Remus straightening and unstraightening his bad leg slowly. He runs his hand along his thigh in a ginger, tentative motion, and then looks up at Sirius and asks, “Are they all like her? Your family, I mean.” With a slight twitch of hope to his voice he adds, “Is she the worst one?”

 

“She’s about par for the course,” he answers, and sees a flash of pity cross Remus’s face.

 “You know,” he says, “I never doubted anything you told me about your family, but I guess it’s different seeing it right in front of me.” His gaze goes to the door, where she stormed out, and then he glances back at Sirius. He gives him a look akin to the one he gave him the first day Sirius decided to sit down with him at the university café: it is a searching look, one that seems to take in everything about him in an instant, critical and sparing nothing. The last time Sirius had been on the receiving end of such a look Remus had begun frowning at him almost at once and Sirius had known that he’d come up short in his estimation; and why shouldn’t he have? He must have seemed so presumptuous to Remus, joining him out of admitted boredom and because James wasn’t around. And yet he must have seen something in him – even if it was only his good looks – and that had been enough to make him relent and allow Sirius to stay. He wonders what his life would be like now if Remus had brushed him off, refused him at the very beginning of his advances. He thinks of Grimmauld Place, all those beautiful ornamentations and pieces of furniture locked away in darkened rooms, slowly gathering dust, and figures his life would be just that way. He feels fortunate that he was given a chance to leave and love someone like Remus, and even more so when the look Remus is giving him ends, this time, in an amazed smile.

 

“You’re really remarkable,” he tells Sirius. “I hope you know that. To grow up around people like her and still end up being as kind and loving as you are is really, really incredible, Sirius. I think most people…that would crush every ounce of goodness out of them. I know you worry you’re like them, but I don’t think you are. Not deep down, anyway.

 

“Aw, you’re just saying that so I’ll make dinner,” Sirius teases lamely, trying to cut off the swell of emotion rising in his chest and the tears pricking his eyes.

 

“No,” Remus says, leaning forward to cup Sirius’s cheek in one hand. “I’m not. I mean every word. You’re wonderful, Sirius. You’re the most generous and loving person I know. And I love you very, very much.”

 

Sirius’s cheeks hurt from smiling, and his tears overflow, running down Remus’s fingers and the rise of his cheeks. He turns his head so that he can kiss Remus’s palm and says, his voice choked, “I’m so happy I met you. I think that every day. And I think about the first time I saw you in the café, and the first time we spoke there. I mean it, Remus. I think about that all the time.”

 

Remus strokes Sirius’s cheek with his thumb. “Me too,” he says, smiling.

 

“Really?”

 

“Well…maybe not that first moment,” Remus admits with a little laugh. “But certainly the ones near it.”

 

“I was a prat that first time, huh?”

 

“No more so than you are now,” he says drily, giving Sirius’s cheek a little pat. He pulls his hand back and smiles before he says, “I used to go there just to see you. That’s what I think about.”

 

Sirius, his hand sneaking over the table, intent on getting Remus’s hand back, blinks, confused. “What?”

 

“The café. I would go just so I could catch a glimpse of you. For the obvious reasons and also because…well, you made my life so much brighter. I told myself it was just for artistic purposes you know, and it felt like something safe, something nice I could keep to myself because I didn’t think I had a prayer of a chance with you. And I think that if I really hadn’t had a chance with you, and if we’d never met, I would have still kept going back to the café to see you. Which is probably a terribly creepy thing to admit but…I don’t know. It’s just that the days without you – both now and then – felt like they had less color in them. So that’s what I think about.” He looks up at Sirius and blushes at the incredulous, overwhelmed expression he sees on his face. “Have I really never told you this before? I could’ve sworn—”

 

Sirius breaks apart his swearing with a kiss. “I love you,” he says again, when he has spent all of his breath into the kiss. He leans his forehead against Remus’s and they sit there, breath knitting into breath, their hearts rising to the same tempo, their hands slowly lowering to graze against the edges of each other’s clothes, the collars, the hems, the sleeves, skin skimming skin, and their eyes drinking each other in.

 

They make it to the bed half-unawares, the transition from the kitchen to the bedroom a thing of beauty, the both of them managing Remus’s bad leg seamlessly in a maneuver that is less like practiced carefulness and more like the fluidity of a dance. They drop their shirts as they go and trail their lips and fingers across each other’s skin. Yes, they say as they make a controlled fall to the bed, and yes and yes and yes.

 

Remus chases Sirius’s blushes as they spread; his coloring, even in the depths of summer, is winter pale and pink rises to his skin in starbursts along his neck and even down his chest. Remus runs his lips over every bright spot as it comes to the surface of his skin, and it is the best use of his blood that Sirius can imagine. He sighs and moans, lets Remus take his trousers off and trail his tongue along the inside of his thigh, before he can take no more and he turns them, so that Remus is on his back.

 

He makes quick work of Remus’s trousers and then he kisses him, deeply, before pulling back to look at him fully naked, the scars arrayed along his body like the constellations of a sky only the two of them can see. He thinks how amazing it is that it’s possible to endure so much pain and darkness and not have it destroy you, how scars may form in pain’s wake, but that they are only a mark, however jagged, of resilience and endurance. He loves each mark on Remus, each a sign of his strength, but before he can bend his head to begin his usual ritual of kissing each and every one of them, Remus sighs, adjusts himself on the bed, and whispers, “Sirius.” He gently runs his thumb along Sirius’s cheek as he speaks, then lets his arm fall back to land above his head, across the pillow, his hips cocking slightly, suggestively, putting himself on display. He has never done this before, never assumed such a vulnerable, open position; he has never said to Sirius, as he does now: “Look. Look at me.”

 

And Sirius does, his whole body wracked with tenderness for Remus, for the gift of him here, with him, like this.

 

“Beautiful,” he says, again and again, and there are no protests and no disagreements, only, “You. You too.”

 

They thread into each other, the way ink threads color onto the weave of a page, marks of rough beauty that dazzle and echo. Their skin soaks through with blushes and warmth, and though he wishes he could draw this, capture it on paper so that he could look at it again and again, Sirius knows that no single image could ever compare. He feels Remus in the tips of his hair and the soles of his feet, and in the space between every breath.

 

Sometimes it’s like this: magic, incomparable, painfully simplifying to call it “good sex.” Sirius comes like he hasn’t since he was in his early teens, in a disarming and delighting motion, but it’s the afterglow that truly mesmerizes him: Remus’s lips, slowly stroking his neck, right over the place where the scar on his own neck is, mirroring the way Sirius so often kisses him, giving him back that particular love.

“I should admit to things from earlier in our relationship more often,” Remus says, still shivering slightly, when he has finished with Sirius’s neck.

 

Sirius laughs, kisses him, and they linger together in the afterglow, peaceful as the way the twilight lingers in the summer sky. Minutes pass and then the little post-sex procedure begins: the cleaning up, the pulling back of blankets, the nestling close together. They have recently dropped one step from this routine: the one where Sirius would ask if it’s alright if he stays or Remus asks if he’s staying. It seems superfluous now; he’s here far more often than he’s at Grimmauld Place.

 

Sirius’s hand has taken up its usual residence in the small of Remus’s back, drawing circles within circles within circles, when he admits with a little whisper, “I really believe that we would have found our way to each other no matter what.”

 

If he’d expected a hem and a haw about the likelihood of that he was mistaken, because all Remus says in response is, “Me too.”

 

The night closes over them: they decide to eat takeaway and return to bed, only to find that they’re both too wide awake to sleep. So Remus takes out the record player and they choose their favorites from the previous occupant’s collection. They talk some, but mostly they just listen, lying back on Remus’s bed, staring up at the ceiling as if they might see the music drifting over their heads. It feels to Sirius as though the music is sage smoke wafting through the room, clearing away the last remnants of the bad feelings Bellatrix left behind. He finds himself jostling along to the beat of each song, an irrepressible smile on his face.

 

“Hey,” Remus says, laying a hand on Sirius’s leg and fidgeting a bit with the material of his pajama bottoms. This is another recent development: the change of clothes he has here, his pajamas beside Remus’s in the drawer. “This is probably going to sound silly but –”

 

“Now you know I adore silliness.”

 

Remus gives a little roll of his eyes, his cheeks slightly pink. “But,” he picks up where he left off, “I wanted to know if you’d like to…to dance. Just on the bed. So not real dancing, I guess, just kind of –”

 

“I thought you’d never ask,” Sirius says, and he gathers Remus to him. Remus laughs, blushes, and they begin to sway to the beat, hands on each other’s waists and shoulders like it’s a proper dance, and when the next song comes on, an upbeat big band number, they successfully manage to dip each other, and they roll round on the bed as if twirling. It must look silly, and Remus keeps laughing at its ridiculousness, but it’s every bit as fun as if they were on their feet. They share a sense, however outlandish, that they have invented a new kind of dancing, one with no missed steps and no self-consciousness, no way to break the rhythm and no difficulty in keeping up, where your partner is always near and always dear.

 

They keep going until the records run out and the night sky thins, and end up, at dawn, so far away from where the night began, from where the summer began, and from where their relationship began that they might as well have invented themselves anew too.

 

…

 

Sirius returns to Grimmauld Place on Monday and finds the contract from Bellatrix waiting for him. It’s detailed down to the individual pieces of jewelry she wishes to receive, including some items of his mother’s, and she’s written instructions on which of his properties she wants him to take his things from first. He prices out the items to be sure she’s not going over what he’s promised her and tries to guess which things were specifically requested by Riddle. There’s an ivory walking stick gifted to his great-grandfather by some monarch or other that might be the sort of prestige piece that speaks to Riddle, or perhaps it’s the country estate, the one they never go to but which is the oldest of their land holdings. He must be imagining himself hosting parties instead of lurking on the outskirts of them, hoarding power instead of sordid gossip. But Sirius knows that there’s nothing in that estate or in any of his bank accounts that can give Riddle what he really wants – even if he married Bellatrix he still wouldn’t be a Black. He takes no satisfaction in this; in fact he feels sorry for the man. Bad enough to be a Black, worse to wish you were one.

 

He shakes his head over it, signs the contract, and gets his affairs in order. Bellatrix has given him until the end of the week to begin transferring over all the deeds and funds, and so the entire transaction slips his mind until he returns to the house on Thursday.

 

When he comes in and sees Kreacher wearing the same smug smile he had always worn when Sirius was about to get into trouble as a boy he knows that his mother must be having one of her more lucid days and has probably spent her lucidity complaining about what a disappointment he is. Sure enough when he goes to knock on her door he finds her upright and alert, waiting for him. He sees that she’s wearing her emerald hairpins and the large antique diamond and green enamel ring that was once used to slip poison into the drinks of 17th century courtiers – both items that Bellatrix specifically requested – and knows that she’s gone through his letters.

 

“Mother,” he begins with a sigh, but before he can say anything more she cuts him off.

 

“Well,” she says, her voice cutting through the air like steel. “Look who it is. The prodigal son.”

 

He braces himself for her to confuse him with Regulus, but today, it would seem, she knows exactly who he is.

 

“You would think that I would be inured to your outlandish antics by now, and yet here I am, astounded by your most recent audacity.”

 

“Mother,” Sirius says, unable to resist. “Please. Language.”

 

“Sit down,” she snaps at him, pointing roughly at the chair beside her bed. She waits until he sits to go on, raising her finger to point it in his face. “God only knows how the mechanisms of your mind work. You yourself probably aren’t even aware of your own thought processes: it’s certainly the only thing that explains your reckless idiocy. But if you could try, Sirius, to put into words what passes in your mind for reasoning, then please do because I would love to know why it is you think you can just up and sell half of your inheritance to that ingrate cousin of yours!”

 

The calm comes easy now, despite the fact that she’s raising her voice in that particular way that makes the hair stand up on his arms and neck. “You read the letter,” he says steadily. “You know why.”

 

“Photographs!” she exclaims, and he thinks he will have to explain all that to her again. But then she adds: “All that money for dirty photographs of you and your urchin boyfriend! It’s unbelievable.”

 

He sighs again. “Listen, I had to do something. My back was against the wall –”

 

“Yes, I saw your back against the wall and if there’s any justice in this world that’ll be the next memory this damned disease takes from me.”

 

She picks an envelope up from the pile of papers she has on her lap and tosses it at him. It hits his chest before he catches it, mortification dulling his reflexes.

 

“There,” she says sourly. “Enjoy.”

 

He looks down at the envelope, opens it up and finds copies of all the photographs that were taken of him and Remus. He turns the envelope upside down and the negatives and the memory cards from the cameras tumble out into his palm as well. He stares at them, marveling at how fast Bellatrix was able to get to the bank, and then remembers that the property contracts are still in his room; he had stopped here to pick them up.

 

“But…how do you have these?” he asks her.

 

“How do you think?” she spits. “I had to take care of things since apparently you’re incapable.”

 

“Yes,” he says, feeling impatient now, “but my question is _how_?”

 

He worries for a moment that she must have done something sinister to procure these pictures, something done when she was only half aware of herself. This concern must pass across his face because she gives him a cool look and scoffs, “It wasn’t at all complicated, Sirius, which you might have realized had you not jumped at the first piece of bait your cousin threw in the water. In fact it took me barely five minutes to correct a whole host of your mistakes.”

 

Sirius, relieved, resists the urge to roll his eyes. “Yes, yes, alright, you’re a genius, Mother, they ought to put your face on money, alright, now how did you do it?”

 

She seems not to know what to do with his glibness; usually at this point in their conversations they’d both be yelling at each other. But Sirius is drawing strength from all his sessions with McGonagall and all his time with Remus, and if he has to leave the conversation before he finds out how she got the photographs, then so be it. The itch of curiosity is worth less than his mental well-being.

 

But after she narrows her eyes and delivers her coldest look, she finally gets straight to the point and says, “I spoke with her mother.”

 

Sirius’s eyebrows go up, but he says nothing, which encourages her to continue.

 

“Druella has always been amenable to suggestion. She married my idiot brother, after all. I merely had to imply a little, trade a little, and then she performed beautifully. Lucky for her that she had only daughters. They are far easier to break in – or so it would seem.”

 

Sirius has to resist the urge to smack his own forehead: of course! What an idiot he was to have forgotten that Bellatrix is even more beholden to her mother’s judgments than he is to his. Not that he would’ve gotten anywhere by calling Druella though, seeing as she shares the family’s general distaste for him. Only his own mother had any power over Druella, who was cruel and ruthless in her own right. He has to forcibly smother a smile at the thought of Bellatrix, only just that day, getting chewed out by Druella as if she were still a schoolgirl.

 

“Huh,” he says finally, impressed despite himself. “Well done.”

 

“You would think you’d be grateful,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him. “A decent son would thank me for saving _half_ his fortune, but you –”

 

“Thank you, Mother,” he says loudly, and probably less graciously than he should. “I sincerely appreciate it.”

 

She narrows her eyes at this. “I would say you’re welcome,” she says, “but I can’t say I like your tone.”

 

“Alright, then,” he says.

 

He gets to his feet, readying to leave, but before he can she snaps out, “Sit down. There’s something else.”

 

He sighs inwardly. He might’ve known. Naturally, there would be strings attached to the tremendous favor she just did him. As happy as he is that Bellatrix has been thwarted he feels certain that whatever his mother wants from him won’t be nearly half as painless as giving away half of his fortune. He sits down, jaw tight, and awaits the prologue of abuse he’s sure will come before her request.

 

But all she does is take two items from the pile of papers on her lap and force them into her arms. “There,” she says coldly, “you ought to be satisfied with that.”

 

He looks down and opens the first item – an embossed black portfolio book – to find official looking documents inside. It is, he realizes, her will, freshly signed and updated only this morning. It’s far thinner than it would have been when his father was still alive and she still had access to the majority of their fortune, but she had directly inherited enough from her own father – this house, for one – to necessitate a lawyer’s input. In her typical fashion she’s included a page depicting the family tree to go along with the official documentation of her estate, and his gaze strays briefly to his own name before he looks over the will. There are no big surprises, though he sees that she’s allocated most of her nicer jewelry – including the pieces she’s wearing – to Druella, likely as payment for the photographs. Bellatrix, on the other hand, has gotten nothing. And for all those threats all those years of cutting him off he still sees his name beside every major asset – written right next to Regulus’s.

 

He lets his fingers stray briefly to the line listing them as joint owners of Grimmauld Place, and then he closes the portfolio, sets it aside, and finally notices the second item she’d handed him.

 

“Congratulations,” she tells him. “You’ll get everything. Not that I had much choice. It was you or your cousins and you won the coin toss so –”

 

“Right, sure, good for me. Mother, what is this?” he asks, cutting her off. He’s staring down into his lap, unable to make himself look away or touch what she’d handed him. He almost feels as though it’s looking back at him.

 

“What does it look like?” she says impatiently.

 

What it looks like: a sketchbook. A sketchbook with Regulus’s name written in script on the cover.

 

His fingers flex towards it, and then immediately shy back.

 

“You’ll have to take care of that now,” she says, “if you can manage it.”

His hand convulses into a fist as he sees that this sketchbook is the exact same type as the other one he’d found in the attic, the one Regulus had filled with all his depraved drawings. His throat constricts, wondering what _this_ sketchbook has inside it, and he tries and fails to ask her a question, getting no further than “Wh –”, before she points to the book and says, “I took it from his room. I didn’t want those detectives to get their nasty little hands on it.”

 

He swallows, tries to rein his emotions in. “When…when was this?”

 

“The day they were here,” she says disdainfully, as if he ought to have known this. “I heard them come in, talking to you, and I knew…” Her hand flits to her collarbone, just above her heart, and then falls back into her lap. “I knew it was about him. So I went into his room in case he’d left anything…untoward in there.” Her gaze moves away from him, going around the room, lingering here and there in places before coming to rest on the bed before her, and her own body lying beneath the blankets. When she speaks again her tone is different, as if they had slipped mid-breath into an entirely different conversation. She says to him, near a whisper, all traces of impatience and anger gone: “I kept forgetting where I put it.”

 

“That’s alright,” he says, because it’s as close to an apology as she’s ever uttered aloud in front of him.

 

She shakes her head. “No, it’s not.” She blinks, looks back at him, and then down at the sketchbook. “You’ll have to take care of that now. If you can manage it.”

 

He nods, and when she adds, “It’s very important,” he can resist no longer and he opens it.

 

He pages through it quickly, fingers as light upon the paper as if he were at risk of coming into contact with acid. He wants only to see how much worse this one is, to know what’s in it that would make his mother take it from the police’s reach, so he scans the pages quickly for incriminating pictures – but there are none.

 

He stops midway through the book, where there is a single image drawn across both pages. His hands fall to his lap and he stares at it, feeling his fingers shaking.

 

“Why did you take this?” he asks her, though he does not look up from the image on the pages.

 

“Hm,” she says, her voice distant, and he wrenches his gaze up from the sketchbook to see that she has the portfolio containing her will open in her hands and is looking at the family tree she’s placed there.

 

“Mother,” he says forcefully, trying to drag her attention back to the sketchbook. “Why do you have Regulus’s –”

 

“Regulus,” she says, her lips curled into a sneer. “That little wretch. Such a disappointment. I thought at least he might turn out alright, but no. I have two sons who are disgraces.” She looks up at him, indignant. “ _I_ did everything I was supposed to do. Everything. My entire life.”

 

Sirius restrains the angry words building in the back of his throat, and looks down at the family tree instead, sees all the lines drawn there, one thing leading to another. He has always known that he was born out of duty, not love, but this is the closest his mother has ever come to admitting that to him. He grapples briefly with the death of the little fantasy a part of him has held on to, one where his parents were in love just long enough to produce him and Regulus, and then lets it go.

 

“But,” he says to her, only the slightest tremor in his voice betraying all the emotion he feels, “why did you take this? There’s nothing ‘untoward’ here. It’s just…” He struggles to find a word for what he’s seen in the pages, stretches his hand to touch the image he has open before him.

 

She looks at him like he’s being an impertinent idiot and tells him, “I had to keep it safe.”

 

“But…”

 

She says it again, but softly, “Sirius. I had to keep it safe.”

 

For an instant he pictures her on the second landing, listening to the detectives at the door. Ill and disoriented as she is, she still knows that something is wrong. She hears Regulus’s name and at once goes to his room, filled with a protective instinct that is less maternal and more clannish: Blacks protect their own. That’s how it’s always been. She would have moved as fast as she could, no matter what pain it caused her, looking for anything that would hurt Regulus in the eyes of the law, and instead she had come upon this, his sketchbook.

 

He imagines her opening it – her mind disjointed, her body in pain, detectives in her foyer, and the wrongness of them being there – and seeing before her, in pencil and a few swipes of ink, the very room she’s standing in. The next page: the window, the view half-obscured, dull shading on the top half of the glass to indicate the sun’s glare. The page after that: a football resting in dried, dead grass, the brittleness of the grass highlighted in light brown and thin streaks of green. After that: the garden of their country estate, vines growing up the side of an empty fountain, clouds low and dark in the sky. And the next page, and the next, more views of quiet, lonely scenes, images that even when they are drawn in color have a quality of grayness, but these interspersed sporadically, almost blindingly, with images of living things. Fat lemons dangling from branches, trees crooked and tall, dogs gamboling in the dog park, snakes behind glass at the zoo, but mainly, overwhelmingly, there were portraits.

 

They were strangers at first, people Regulus must have seen in the park, or on the way to school, quick studies of unfamiliar faces and profiles. But then, partway through, the faces became recognizable: the headmaster at their boarding school, the football coach, the prettiest girl from Sirius’s year. And then, the more intimate portraits, the people who were nearer to him, the subjects obviously made to pose. Evan Rosier in his football uniform, half smile on his face, lounging back in an armchair, slyly flipping the bird on his thigh. Dorcas Meadowes, who Regulus dated for nearly a year, in profile, her hand at the collar of her blouse, a subdued expression on her normally animated face. Kreacher – and Sirius almost goggles at this – smiling widely, his hands held primly in front of him, his suit immaculately rendered in felt tip pen. Each one is accurately done, proportions perfect, flaws intact – the acne scars on Rosier’s chin, and the errant hairs coming out of Kreacher’s nose both there – and no surprise, since Regulus so loved his finicky accuracy. But the realism of them, the way they could almost pass for photographs, is not what holds the eye. There is some ineffable quality to them, something that strikes through to the quick of the viewer. He has done, Sirius realizes, what sunlight does in the early morning, when it washes again into the world. At dawn, the light does not light: it haloes. It makes a beautiful haze around all things. He has seen Remus enough in that light to know what it does to the heart, the way the tenderness of your feelings rise so fast to the surface it hurts. And there _is_ tenderness here, in the drawings Regulus has done, and if it’s hard to recognize that it is only because of the skill involved, the lengths he went to hide it.

 

But their mother, with her keen, exacting eyes, must have seen it the moment she stood in his room, the detectives below, their voices nearing, the sketchbook open in her hands. She has to have seen it, because she took it with her.

 

Sirius thinks of her in this moment, rushing from the room, the book bundled in her arms, and what had decided her. Because the police would not have taken it. There was nothing provocative about it. And yet he would have done the same. Because all that perfectionism and all those lonely spaces and all that broken tenderness was him. It was Regulus. And although she had failed him in so many ways – as Sirius had – she had had enough goodness within her to do this. She had kept this piece of him safe.

 

“Mother,” he says, and then nothing else, because there is nothing he can say that will fully explain what it means to have this book, this single consolation like a point of light in the blackness of the loss.

 

She looks at him, expecting more, and when he does not speak her gaze drifts to the page he has the sketchbook opened to, and she nods her chin at it.

 

“That’s the best one.”

 

He startles at this, and looks down at the page as well to see the drawing that had stilled his fingers and stuttered his heart. It is the last portrait in the sketchbook, and it is of Sirius himself.

 

So still and stark this image – just him alone at the dining room table, bent over a sketchbook of his own, no color, just ink – and yet the sight of it hits Sirius with all the force and vitality of a living thing. He _remembers_ this. He remembers that flower arrangement on the table, he remembers those particular pens and that shirt he was wearing. And he remembers Regulus, entering the room in silence, pulling out the chair across from him, and the uncommon calm that fell between them, a singular moment where they were simply _together_. It is a moment he has held onto tightly and revisited again and again, particularly over these last few weeks as he’s been drawing. He thinks of the easy quiet, the way Regulus was so focused, so much the best part of himself, and the way he had captured that in the portrait that he had drawn of his brother.

 

It makes his heart ache to know that as he was drawing his portrait of Regulus, Regulus was drawing a portrait of him; that they had both been reaching out to each other in the only way that they’d known how, and that they had tried, in lines and curves of ink, to give each other the only kind of affection they were capable of.

Because there is affection here in this drawing of Sirius, just as there is in Sirius’s drawing of Regulus. It is painstaking and unsparing, yes, but it lacks the quality of judgment the other portraits have, and there is no anger, no rough, unruly line. There is the subtle tenderness that exists in all the portraits – the careful lines that compose Sirius’s mouth, the errant lock of hair – and a hint of something else, something deeper. The lines around Sirius’s eyes are smudged, ever so slightly, as if Regulus had longed to draw them raised, longed for their eyes to meet and have that connection that had so often eluded them. He wants that now, so badly, for Regulus to walk in and for their eyes to meet, but he knows that cannot be. So he looks at his own image, his own eyes that will never be raised, and feels himself overwhelmed with regret and with love. _Regulus_ , he thinks, again and again, and then he swallows down a cry, feels his mother still looking at him, and remembers that she pointed to this picture of him and called it the best one.

 

“This one?” he whispers to her, fingertips gliding just above the lines.

 

She nods. “He’s good,” she allows, in the stilted tone of voice she always uses whenever they did something so exceptional it forced a compliment out of her. Her jaw constricts and she looks away from the drawing. “He was good, anyway.” Her eyes dart back up to Sirius’s face, as if expecting a challenge and she says, “I know he’s gone.”

 

And what can he say to this, but “Yes. He is.”

 

The ferocity of her gaze then is almost too much to bear; so much anger and pain in a single look. He holds her gaze as long as he can and then looks down at the bed, sees her hand, small atop the blankets. Without thinking he reaches for her, cups her hand within his, and squeezes. It is a wholly inadequate gesture, and one she does not return, but she does not pull away from him either, and she does not ask him how much longer he’s going to stay.

 

“You’ll take care of it,” she says when he finally stands, and it’s an order, not a question.

 

“I will,” he says, and he holds the sketchbook to his chest.

 

She’s no longer looking at him, her gaze going on to drift around the room again. When he reaches the door he turns and catches her looking down at her hand. As always there is a haughty expression on her face, an iciness that seems to permeate the very air around her, and she is every inch the woman who abused and neglected him by turns. But still he tries, for that one moment, to imagine her as Regulus might have drawn her: as though the dawn’s light were just coming in, softening the angles of her face, diminishing the harshness of her expression, warming by a few degrees her perpetual frost, and in this way, with the gentleness of his pen, making, at last, a mother out of her.

 

…

 

What he does with Regulus’s sketchbook is this: he goes, page by page, and takes a picture, just in case, and he saves the pictures to multiple drives. It is not so much a protection against possible catastrophe as it is the kind of thoroughness he believes that Regulus would have employed, wanting to be sure that he had what he needed against all odds.

 

Once he has done this he goes through the book again, runs his fingers along all the lines, and looks into each picture as deeply as if they were hanging in a museum and he had traveled a very long way just to see them. When he has spent enough time with each drawing he takes his own sketchbook out – and a pair of scissors.

 

He cuts out the drawings, the best from each sketchbook. The lonely places, the series of transformations, the still lifes they both did of Grimmauld Place, and, of course, the portraits they unknowingly did of each other in the dining room on the exact same day. He puts the two portraits side by side and smiles over the similarities and differences in their styles, and then he takes out a needle and a thick black thread. He sews – clumsily and with some cursing – all their drawings together, each page alternating between the two of them, and makes a new sketchbook, one that belongs to both of them.

 

“Well,” he says when it’s done and the cover and back are fitted neatly on. “There we are, Reg. There we are.”

He has had flowers sent in, but they’re nothing funereal. They’re peonies and sweet peas, the flowers that were on the dining room table when they were both there drawing. He sets them in a simple crystal bowl, and brings them in to Regulus’s bedroom. He has not come in here often since Regulus disappeared; the sense of his presence still lingers in the way the room is kept, everything in it just the way he left it. Kreacher had gone to great lengths to put it back this way after the police tore through it, and so whenever he enters it is easy to believe that Regulus has only stepped out, that he’s not really gone. It is a disarming sensation and one that always hurts and drives him away. And yet it is because this room is so full of the vividness of Regulus’s life that Sirius feels that this is the only appropriate place for him to say good-bye. The mausoleum belongs to their family; the Rosier’s woodlands belonged to all of Regulus’s little gang; but this place was wholly his, the bright spot he carved for himself out of the darkness of their childhood. Football posters on the walls, neat stacks of well-loved books on his organized desk, a corkboard containing a star map and the postcard Sirius sent him from Pompeii: every inch a compendium of all that was light and good in him.

 

Sirius enters without knocking; why change old habits now? He comes inside and sets the bowl of flowers on the nightstand, and looks around with their sketchbook tight in his hand.

 

“I made you something,” he says aloud, gesturing to the sketchbook. “I just wish you were here to see it. I wish…oh, a lot of things, Reg. That I’d been better to you. That we’d been closer. That you hadn’t done all that stupid shit you did. That you were here – well, I guess that goes without saying. But I’ve got to say this to you, even though I know it’s too little, too late. I love you, Reg. And I’m so sorry. For – for everything.”

 

He comes to stand at the bed, closes his eyes, tries to breathe.

 

“I’ll be leaving. Sooner or later. But I’ll still look after everything around here. I’ll still visit Mother, even though it’ll probably aggravate the hell out of me to keep coming back to her. I guess I see it as a fucked up competition though. I want to be a better caretaker to her than she ever was to me. But anyway I’ll be with Remus – I’ll be gone – and so I…I have to move on. I have to let you go. Or – not quite let you go, but…oh, it’s hard to say it in a way that doesn’t sound stupid. I’m leaving, Reg, and you’re gone, so we’ve got to say good-bye. Or, well, you know. _I_ have to.”

 

He loosens his hold on the sketchbook, reaches out, and sets it onto Regulus’s bed. He holds his fingertips against the cover, not letting go of it just yet, and he closes his eyes, and tries to summon the feeling he gets when he draws, the sense that Regulus is near him. It comes to him more easily now, the sense that he is not alone, that his brother is close by, just out of sight. He holds tight to that feeling, savors it as long as he can, and then he draws breath to speak.

 

“Good-bye, Reg,” he says, and he lets the sketchbook go, and the feeling that he is not alone in the room goes with it.

 

It is not enough; nothing ever could be. But it feels necessary, an act of release, like letting go of a too long held breath. And though his lungs may ache, and his eyes may stream, and nothing will ever be as it was again, the air is in him now, the space around him wide and without constraint, and he finally feels like he’s free to breathe and to be.

 

…

 

Summer dissolves away like fizz in soda: airy and effervescent. The last week of it goes by in a series of late night double dates in the heart of the city with James and Lily, and finishes with a monumental party at Peter’s place, an event so fun and full of laughter that it almost makes Sirius like Peter again. He and Remus end up spending the last day before term begins nursing hangovers and lying in bed, the window only opened a crack, the cool tint to the air already apparent.

 

The first day of class is far more exciting for Sirius than usual. He actually gets up early so he can see Remus to the arts building and wish him a happy first day. They don’t have any classes together, but it’s exciting to know he’s so near. He bounces on his toes all morning and James has to push him into his seat in their first lecture.

 

“Let me get this straight,” James says, “Remus’s first class is at eight, and our first lecture doesn’t start until ten, but you still got up with him to take him to school?”

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Damn,” James says, circles beneath his eyes, looking impressed. “Guess that’s how you know it’s love.”

 

Sirius is smug over this until halfway through the lecture, when he almost falls asleep in his chair until James prods him awake. “My God, it’s like you don’t even care to hear a mind-numbing read through of everything already written in the syllabus,” James whispers to him, their perpetual first day complaint.

 

Sirius manages to wake himself up enough for lunch, and he, James, and Lily meet Remus at the edge of campus to walk to the usual café. Remus’s smile is almost double its usual size, and Sirius figures that’s down to being in school again until he says, “This is so bloody _nice_. I can’t believe I’m really here.”

 

“At school?”

 

“Well, that too of course. But no, I meant I can’t believe I’m coming to the café from the same direction you always do. I’ve watched you come from here so many times and wished I was with you – and now I’m here.” He looks at Sirius, some shyness in his smile now. “It sounds silly.”

 

“No,” Sirius assures him, “it doesn’t. It’s lovely.”

He’s glad to be here too – at his university, heading towards his favorite café – even if having a degree in biology isn’t part of his life’s ambition. He’s decided he’s going to stay in school until he gets his degree; it’ll give him time to figure out exactly which direction he’d like to take his culinary career and he likes the idea of having finished what he started. He’s spoken about it with McGonagall and she was very pleased with his reasoning; he’s been boasting to everyone who will listen for days that she said it was a “very mature decision.”

 

The coffee and food in the café taste especially good that day. They’ve already started serving their more autumn themed soups – curry pumpkin coconut, tomato basil, rosemary chicken noodle – though the bougainvillea are still blooming brightly over the café’s storefront. It’s pleasant to slurp down a soup all the same, and Remus and Sirius chase theirs with a chocolate éclair, the first thing they ever shared at the café, and return to university, smiling and satiated.

 

The bougainvillea over the café’s doorway fade in the coming weeks as autumn settles in properly. It proves to be a picture perfect autumn, and Sirius would know as he’s taken up photography now. He’d always felt most confident in the more creative aspect of his drawings; inspiration for new forms and themes had always come relatively easily to him. Just as it is with cooking he loves the act of transformation – have a seashell turn into a mirror, or a table into a tree – but ever since he’s had a look at Regulus’s sketchbook he’s been wondering about the skill and technique involved in making drawings that were photo-realistic and so he’s taken to taking photographs of scenes that interest him and puzzling over them in his sketchbook. It becomes a thing he does to take his mind out of itself, just like the crosswords he’s enjoyed since he was a boy, and he finds himself doing it whenever he’s frustrated with his schoolwork or if a recipe he’s trying out just isn’t working. It helps, in the way a long walk or a shower helps in resetting the mind and allowing him to see the problem from a different angle, and he likes admiring the results. And he feels close to Regulus when he does this, or at the very least he remembers him more clearly, and though it hurts sometimes, he knows that’s important too. He doesn’t want to forget his brother and what good he had in him, and if there are times he feels like he never said good-bye, when the hurt is as fresh as the day it happened, well, that’s only natural. Mourning is a series of good-byes, just as life is. He draws out the pain if he can, and tries to make art of his loss.

 

And in between all his drawing and photography, life, of course, goes on, and he finds himself busier than ever this term. Apart from his increasing schoolwork, his standing dates with Remus, football with James, and his therapy sessions with McGonagall, Lily has roped him into joining the festival committee at school. The festival committee – which organizes all the parties and events at the university – proves to be the biggest time suck, but he finds to his surprise that he loves it. Due to the notoriousness of his annual Halloween parties he’s put in charge of the Halloween festival at school. Everything, from the decorations to the music to the food, falls under his purview, and he’s up nights long after Remus has gone to bed, perfecting each element of the event. Remus makes fun of him for how seriously he’s taking this _party_ , but every time Sirius needs his opinion on something he gives him a thoughtful answer, and on the nights leading up to the party he volunteers to help with the set-up and presses cups of coffee into Sirius’s hands whenever he’s on the verge of a stress headache. And the night before, when Sirius’s nerves are so jittery he can’t even lie down, Remus stays up with him. At first he tries to help Sirius get to sleep and he wears out his knowledge of meditative breathing techniques and runs through his hidden cache of rain sound CDs, but when those don’t work they just sit up in bed, talking and listening to the wind rattle the panes in the glass.

 

“If this goes well,” Sirius says in the heart of the night, when secrets come most easily to the surface, “I think this might be it for me. Putting together that menu and managing the assembly line for all the cooking – I loved that. I could do this, Remus. I could be really, really good at this.”

 

“I know,” Remus says, smiling as he leans in to kiss Sirius’s temple, and Sirius wonders if he knew all along that this was the kind of career he’d gravitate towards. “And don’t worry about the festival. It’s going to be brilliant.”

 

Sirius is buoyed by this, and though he doesn’t end up getting very much sleep when he wakes he feels confident that the festival will go off without a hitch.

 

To be fair, there are a few hitches – the microphones refuse to work for the first fifteen minutes the band is there, and the first batch of punch has to be thrown out when someone finds a fly in it – but once Sirius and Lily put these small fires out the rest of the night is as perfect as a film scene.

 

They had taken a chance that the weather would be decent and set up the majority of the festival outside, and this risk has paid off handsomely: the night is cloudless with just the hint of a breeze, and the air has that wonderful autumnal quality that can only be described as _crisp_. The sun goes down promptly at 5:55, just as the first party-goers enter the large common area the festival has been set up in.

 

There are long-tapered candles everywhere, some of them electric and strung up to look as though they are floating, but most of them lit with real flame. Some sit inside old-fashioned looking lanterns purloined from the theatre department while others flicker from within the mouths of toothy jack o’ lanterns. There is a contest, early on, for carving pumpkins and so the ranks of glowing jack o’ lanterns swell and diversify throughout the evening as each pumpkin is given its own candle. James’s pumpkin, which comes in second place, sits front and center with its cheesy grin and antlered head, which James made by cutting another pumpkin to shreds.

 

Beyond the pumpkins lie the stage and the dance floor; both themed to look like a creepy graveyard, replete with headstones containing groan-inducing puns instead of names and dates. The stage, which was Lily’s brain child, looks especially good: a perpetual fog rolls across the floor and tall, gnarly prop trees loom over the band and their instruments while a sickly yellow bulb, meant to be the moon, rotates through the branches. The true moon, a few days past full, winks in and out of view throughout the night. The band, which Sirius had hired last year for his own party, comes dressed as a host of vampires and plays the usual party standards, alongside some wonderfully bizarre versions of Halloween songs – including a sexy cover of “Monster Mash” and a ballad rendition of “Thriller.” Sirius feels vindicated each time the crowd claps and cheers; he had had to fight other members of the committee who had wanted a DJ instead.

 

Past the dance floor, near the edge of the festival where there are more fake, spooky trees and floating candles, there are tables with trays overflowing with the requisite Halloween candy, set between bowls filled with punch and apple cider. Each bowl or tray is festooned with a bit of fake cobweb, which thins as the night wears on and an increasingly drunk crowd mistakes it for food, leaving Sirius grateful that they’d bought the cheapest fake cobwebs they could.

 

The candy trays are emptied out quickly, but the real piece de resistance is the buffet further back. The buffet, which is decorated with elegant candelabras, themselves draped with cobwebs, is heaped with slow cooked meatballs in slider buns that had googly eyes made of jalapenos, pumpkin risotto mounded into the shape of a skull, butternut squash and turmeric soup with a drizzle of coconut milk on top in the shape of a spiderweb, and roasted chicken with apples that is delicious enough to go unthemed. It all goes so fast that Sirius barely gets a taste, but nothing goes faster than the mini-caramel apple pies set out on the dessert tray. Sirius laments the fact that he didn’t even get one for roughly fifteen minutes, until Remus sneaks up behind him and pushes two onto his plate.

 

“Don’t look so touched,” Remus says as he sits down beside him. “It’s just that I took twelve of those and could only manage ten.”

 

It’s the end of the night at the end of a few very long weeks of preparation, and so Sirius finds this far funnier than he should. Lily is across from him, head propped on her chin, guzzling down the last coffee she’ll need to see the festival through till the end. The band is playing their second to last song and the both of them will have to go up on stage to thank everyone for coming soon. Late as it is – and as full of other devious opportunities as the city has – the party is still crowded, and the three of them look out into the masses and try to pick out people they know. Mostly everyone is in costume, which makes this a difficult task, but they still manage to spy Snape – dressed as a vampire, the same as every year – and their chemistry teacher Flitwick (a wee unicorn), and Peter, who has outdone himself this year by dressing as a three-headed goblin. But the real shock comes when a shadow falls across their table and Sirius looks behind him to see McGonagall in a black gown and a pointed hat, dressed as a proper witch.

 

“Good show, Black,” she says to him, lifting her drink. She is holding, he sees to his delight, her own personal flask.

 

“I hope you were able to get some food,” he tells her with a beaming smile.

 

“Got it, ate it, loved it,” she informs him crisply, and his smile stretches even wider. “But don’t let it go to your head.”

 

“Oh, never.”

 

This is a joke between the two of them and he sees her forcing down a smile as she lifts her gaze to nod at Remus and Lily. Sirius had introduced her to Remus early in the semester when Remus was with him outside her office waiting for his session to start, and he’s since given her carte blanche to approach him in public. He sees no sense in playing coy about this; all his friends know he’s in therapy. Still, she doesn’t linger after shaking hands with Remus and Lily and giving Sirius one last, quick smile.

 

“Thursday at four, Black,” she reminds him as she goes, and he watches her slip into the crowd, passing James as he heads their way. “You lot are up!” he shouts and Sirius and Lily jump to their feet.

 

They take the stage amid the last guitar strums of the band’s final song and thank everyone for being there. They get one last round of applause for the band and congratulate again the winner of the pumpkin carving contest. With the music over and the bright lights from the surrounding buildings turned on full blast the crowd doesn’t do much lingering and Sirius and Lily are left surveying the damage and assessing what they’ll be able to do better the next time around. A costume contest is the next obvious expansion, and maybe some midway style games if the university will give them an even larger space. They debate the merits over this or that option as they inwardly sigh over how much trash people have left behind and how much cleaning there is to be done.

 

But just as they and the rest of the committee are preparing to roll up their sleeves and spend another three hours working on this festival, who should come to the rescue but James with the entire football club in tow?

 

“What’s all this?” Lily asks, as James comes up onto the stage with a crowd of young men behind him.

 

“What’s it look like? We’re the cleaning crew,” James says with a smile. Beside him Sirius sees Lily practically deflate with relief; now they can be out of here in half the time.

 

Sirius looks around for Remus, thinking he’ll tell him he’ll see him tomorrow, but Remus, it transpires, is on the cleaning crew too. He marches up with a clipboard and a list of what things – the speakers, the props for the stage – are meant to go where. He and James end up delegating out the heavy lifting assignments to the football club and Sirius, Lily, and the festival committee are left with the relatively easy job of cleaning up the food tables.

 

It ends up being an oddly fun end to the night: someone pulls a portable speaker and an mp3 player from their knapsack and a whole host of songs that Sirius hasn’t heard since his early adolescence begin to play. Bad singing abounds, trash bags pile up, and Remus plies Sirius and Lily with one last cup of coffee each when they refuse to leave before the job is done. The others drink beers that froth over the sides of the cans; the footballers make a contest of smashing them into discs on their foreheads when they’re done and they’re the last bits of trash to be cleared away. It ought not to be so funny – especially since it’s something that Lily would usually shake her head over – but the both of them are so far out into the realm of tiredness that all they can do is laugh.

 

As everything is cleared away the festival space takes on a surreal cast. The bones of the stage loom over everything, the grass is flattened and punch-stained, and practically all the tables are folded away and lined up against the buildings. Sirius glances at his watch and the numbers don’t make sense. He was already awake at this very minute only twenty-four hours ago. He feels light on his feet as he comes to the last table that needs to be put away. There is still a candelabra on the table, fallen on its side and Sirius stops when he sees it. This view – the debris of a party, the overturned object, the hint of loneliness the night always brings – is so perfectly Regulus that the loss hits him right between the ribs. But he smiles – forcing himself at first – as he thinks of the beauty his brother would have made of this, the still, startling art he would have crafted line by line. “I love you,” he whispers, and he holds the image in his mind as long as can, before he can hear the others coming up behind him and he rights the candelabra and begins to fold the whole table away.

 

With the table packed up they have finished the cleaning and Lily promptly falls asleep on the spot, the coffee having done as much for her as it can. James laughs, brushes her hair out of her eyes, and gives her the soppiest look that Sirius has ever seen pass across his face. Luckily for James, Sirius, too, is nearly about to pass out and so it goes uncommented upon. He manages to help James get her to the university entrance, with Remus following behind with her bag and shoes. They hail a cab together and pile in as clumsily as if they had spent the whole night drinking.

 

“Your leg,” Sirius garbles in Remus’s direction, having to constantly blink his eyes to keep himself awake.

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“Standing. All night. Standing.”

 

“No, I sat for most of it,” Remus says patiently. “You were the one who was standing.”

 

“No, no,” Sirius argues, though he can no longer remember what they were talking about.

 

He doesn’t remember the drive to James’s flat either; the next thing he knows he’s at Remus’s, and Remus is paying the driver.

 

“ _No_ ,” Sirius groans and Remus swats his side. “Oh, get over it. I can pay for you sometimes, you know.”

 

“Fine, fine,” Sirius grumbles, too damn tired to say anything more.

 

Time slips from him again, the night air cold and dissolving, and the next thing he knows he’s in Remus’s bedroom and Remus is undressing him.

 

“Oh, love,” he says as he feels Remus’s fingers go to his belt buckle. “Not tonight, I’m sorry.”

 

But Remus only snorts at his presumption, tells him it’s time to sleep, and pushes him down onto the bed, where Sirius has approximately ten seconds of reveling in the wonderfully comfortable and familiar feel of Remus’s sheets before he falls into the deepest sleep of his life.

 

Beside him, Remus curls up, fitted neatly into all the crooks and hollows of his body, and whispers into his ear a sentiment he feels even as he sleeps: “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

 

…

 

Eleven hours later Sirius wakes with his hair standing up in misshapen corkscrews and ignores Remus’s laughter and derisive remarks as he stumbles to the bathroom. His reflection in the mirror is a piteous sight – pillow indentations all across his forehead, his lips cracked at the sides, and his hair in its profoundly bizarre new shape – and yet he has never felt so refreshed and awake. He yawns and stretches for good measure, then casts another regretful look at his reflection: what if his hair always stays that way?

 

“Remus,” he whines, and feels the pleasure of being able to complain so piteously and so pointlessly to someone. “Remus, I need a – oh, thank you” he says as Remus, who is right at the bathroom door, presses a cup of tea into his hands. “– I need a compliment.”

 

“You what?” Remus says, standing close as Sirius drinks his tea.

 

“Tell me I’m beautiful, Remus. Tell me you’ll stay even if my hair always remains this way.”

 

“I’m leaving you if your hair doesn’t go back to normal within the day. I’ve already started the clock.”

 

“Remus,” he whines again, thoroughly enjoying himself, and Remus rolls his eyes.

 

“Yes, yes. You’re very beautiful, the most beautiful, absolutely gorgeous, alright? Now, are you awake yet or what?”

 

“You don’t sound terribly sincere,” Sirius says. He leans forward an inch and the tangles of his hair practically droop into Remus’s eyes; he is standing terribly close, especially considering that they’re not kissing or fooling around.

 

“You didn’t ask for sincerity. You asked for a compliment. Are you awake or not?”

 

Sirius smirks at his insistence. “I think so.”

 

“How would you rate the degree of your coherence?”

 

“I dunno, 3.8 out of 5? What have I got to be coherent for?”

 

“Drink your tea,” Remus says, pushing the cup up toward his mouth. “I’ll make you coffee if you need it.”

But Sirius ignores the tea and the offer of coffee. He has just realized that Remus is standing strategically between him and the tiny kitchen table. He’s blocking most of it from view but Sirius can still see a hint of blue ribbon and wrapping paper. When he tries to get a better look Remus shuffles to the side, standing in his way.

 

“No, no! You need to be awake for this. Level five coherence only.”

 

“I’m awake, I’m a five, let me see! What is it?”

 

Remus continues to block his view as he says, “Now I know we talked about your birthday –”

 

“Aw, Remus,” he says, even as he bounces on the balls of his feet with excitement. “I hope you didn’t spend a lot.”

 

They had had what they’d laughingly called “straight talk” regarding Sirius’s birthday, and its closeness to their one year anniversary. Sirius was aware of how much money Remus had had to spend on books for his classes, as well as how much money he was losing by only being part-time at the map shop now, and insisted that he’d rather they had a really nice anniversary celebration, rather than Remus having to spend money he didn’t have on a birthday gift he didn’t need. Remus could not help but agree, but he also felt that they should do _something_ for Sirius’s birthday. A dinner with James and Lily was proposed and arranged, with Remus securing the rights to pay for Sirius’s meal, and Sirius feeling pleased that they had been able to arrive at this compromise so maturely. Secretly he had wished for a more elaborate marking of his birthday, but he refused to say anything about this to Remus.

 

But now it looks as though he’s getting a little of what he wanted after all: Remus has gotten him a surprise! And he’d done the clever thing of giving it to him a few days early, rather than waiting until his actual birthday when he might’ve spent half the day expecting such a thing. He bounces again on the balls of his feet, trying to get a look at the gift, and Remus gives him a smile.

 

“I didn’t spend anything,” he warns.

 

“Homemade is better anyway, now let me have it!” he says, making grabby hands at the table. Remus laughs and finally steps aside.

 

The package is small – no thicker than the novels Remus often flies through on the weekends, and roughly the same length as a coffee table book – but it’s beautifully wrapped in metallic blue paper and wrapped round with a navy blue ribbon. Sirius oohs over the wrapping paper and then makes quick work of tearing it to shreds. His bookish suspicions are proven correct: Remus has gifted him with a lovely red and gold portfolio with his name and birthday stitched onto the cover. “Lily’s friend Mary did that,” Remus says, pointing at the stitching. “She works in a stationary shop.” He sounds nervous and eager all in one, a feeling Sirius knows far too well. Picking out a gift for someone you love is a tricky, nerve-wracking business, and Sirius fixes a smile to his face to show that he likes it. The gesture is hardly necessary; he knows he’s going to love whatever’s in the book, even if there are only blank pages inside. It’s his first birthday gift from Remus and that’s an enjoyment unto itself.

 

Remus comes to sit across from him, jostling his knee anxiously, and Sirius opens the cover to discover that there are absolutely no blank pages inside. There is, instead, a card, with a simple cover and a simple inscription – Dear Sirius, I love you. Happy birthday. – and beyond that something that makes Sirius gasp. Remus sits up on the edge of his seat, but Sirius barely notices, his attention consumed by what Remus has given him.

 

On each page within the portfolio there is – but of course – a drawing, done by Remus. The drawings have mainly one theme – Sirius himself – and it takes Sirius only a few moments to realize that they are meant to show the history of their relationship.

 

In the first drawing he is at the café and is nothing more than a distant silhouette. The next few pages are more of the same: gray, impersonal drawings of his posture, his profile, his face. They are stark images, mainly because of their grayness, but also because of the near brutal way Remus handled the lines: the planes of his face sharp and menacing as a sheer drop on a cliff, the roll of his shoulders like the breaking of a tidal wave. They are beautiful, but they lack affection, which is something that Sirius might not have noticed if not for the pictures that followed. The café is still there in the background, but Sirius can tell that these portraits have been done by memory: the pose is a little off, but the features of his face are more vibrant, his eyes facing forward, his gaze, though it’s rendered in pencil, practically piercing. Remus has dated every page so Sirius knows that these are the drawings immediately following their first shared lunch in the café. These particular pages are also filled with doodles, isolated images of coffee cups and pastries, crumpled napkins and motorbike chains, and a pair of hands that Sirius knows to be his own. He can read every emotion that went through Remus at the time he drew these – the edginess, the irritation, the softening, the falling in love – and they make his heart beat fast in his chest as he compares the memory of his own feelings against Remus’s.

 

There are no drawings of this time last year, the few weeks that they were apart and were not speaking, and so the next images are startling in the intensity of their emotion. They are shaky, practically vibrating with joy, mainly doodles, and these only half-done: Sirius’s jacket thrown across the very kitchen chairs they’re sitting in, the bed, its sheets rumpled, a thin sketch of one of Sirius’s own drawings of Remus, crayon used for his scars. And there is, he sees, a Valentine heart propped against a book, just the way Sirius left his invitation to their Valentine’s date last year. The difference being here that there are other hearts floating above with Sirius’s name written in each, as well as a note Remus had written to himself: you are being terribly soppy!

 

Sirius grins and then lets out an appreciative gasp, because the next page is where the color begins. These are the drawings he did on their holiday by the sea: sweeps of deep blue ocean, ripples of green grass, and Sirius, basking in the sunlight, shadow black and cream. Here are all the drawings Sirius knew existed and tried to sneak a peek at: the seaside cottage, the country lane, the ocean, the flowers, the clear blue sky, and all of it overflowing with color, with love. He flips through and past the scenes of their holiday, and then finds himself facing angular images of his own back, dated the days he did not call, the days right before he told Remus about the photographs.

 

In the days following that revelation there is some anger in the pictures – a broken camera, a little fire – but mostly, as it was when they first fell in love, there is a softening: a full page drawing of the hot chocolate from the hotel, and Sirius’s arm splayed across the penthouse suite pillow.

 

The whole spring and summer lies beyond these images, and Sirius sees the peaks and valleys of Remus’s emotions, and is pleased to note that there are mainly peaks. There is still more color here, along with snippets of their dates, vague impressions of park lanes and views from restaurants that bring back a flood of memories to Sirius. There are a lot more doodles of food here – ingredients more than main courses – and Sirius recalls Remus sitting at the kitchen table as he prepared their dinner, murmuring with displeasure whenever Sirius would take away the ingredients to be prepped. He sees signs of Remus’s oft-hidden mischievous nature in the whimsical tilt of the fruits and vegetables, the way they almost seem to dance; and he sees, too, the way he tries to draw beauty out of everything, even out of a wilting herb or a bruised pear. He has come to understand Remus so intimately over this year that he knows before he even turns the page he will see a self-portrait of Remus, bared to the waist, each line and curve seeking beauty amid pain and shame. He sees his own body drawn sprawled on the bed behind Remus’s shoulders, and though his body is drawn with far more tenderness and care than Remus’s own, the self-portrait is not nearly as harsh or as distant as the first images in the book, and Sirius is proud of him.

 

He is coming to the end, to pictures he was aware of posing for – a cheeky, half-naked one of him leaning on Remus’s childhood bed, one where Remus stood close and held his chin so he could get the exact color of his eyes – and though he thinks now there will be no more surprises he finds, as he comes to the final two drawings, that he’s wrong.

 

The penultimate drawing produces a flare of déjà vu: there he is again, in someone else’s sketchbook, bent over his own blank page, drawing too. But it doesn’t wholly startle him, the way finding himself in Regulus’s drawings did; in the back of his mind he had been aware as he’d sat drawing at Remus’s kitchen table, trying to connect with memories of his brother, that Remus was in the room and that he was drawing too. It makes sense that Remus would’ve wanted to capture him in this way: even in sleep it was rare to find him so focused and still – just as it made sense that Regulus wanted a portrait of him drawing. For both Remus and Regulus it was a means of connection, a way to silently reach out and hold him. But where Regulus refused to deviate from reality, Remus has added touches of whimsy: sparks flying above the page Sirius draws on, a spot of yellow above his head as if a light bulb hung there. And he has added, carefully near the table, a third kitchen chair. It is pulled back, as if to make space for someone to sit there, and on the table before it is a rectangular smudge, just the same size as a sketchbook. _Regulus_ , he thinks, and he lifts his eyes to Remus then. Remus smiles hesitantly, as if wondering if he overstepped, but Sirius quickly takes his hand. “It’s lovely,” he says, fervently, his voice choked.

 

Remus blushes and nudges the back of Sirius’s hand with his thumb. “There’s one more,” he says.

 

He turns the page and sees the final drawing. As with the photograph it is copied from it takes a moment for him to realize what he’s seeing: it is abstract, done in dark watercolors, with two bright lines at its center. He squints and then he sees it: the swipes of deep blue and cloudy gray are the walls of an alley, and the two bright lines in the center are him and Remus. It is that moment in the alley, a scene of malicious voyeurism reclaimed and repurposed into an image of surreal, secretive beauty, just as it was originally intended to be.

 

Sirius lifts Remus’s hand and kisses the back of it, feeling overcome. How could he have ever thought of this as only a little surprise? It’s easily the best gift anyone has ever given him.

 

“Remus, I –”

 

But Remus is reaching across from him, and he turns one last page. And Sirius sees that at the end of this book, which shows the whole of their relationship in all its beauty and its tenderness, there is a rudimentary sketch of a tiny house above a piece of scotch tape which holds in place a single business card. The card shows the name Frank Longbottom, and beneath this a single word: realtor.

 

It hits his nerves before it hits his brain, and his hand convulses within Remus’s.

 

Remus clears his throat. “I thought it might be time that we –”

 

“We’re moving in together!” He jumps to his feet and gathers Remus in a hug, kissing and kissing the top of his head before pulling back to look at him and say, “That’s what that means, right? I haven’t just made a huge arse myself?”

 

Remus laughs, and ignores the easy joke. “Yes. That’s exactly what it means.”

 

The kissing resumes before Remus can finish speaking. Sirius comes down from the top of his head to kiss all over his face before finding his lips. They kiss twice, fully, slowly, and then Sirius leans back. “You’re sure?” he says.

 

“Positive,” Remus answers brightly. “After everything that’s happened these past few months, everything we’ve been through together…I know I’m ready. I want to wake up every day and know for sure that you’re going to be there.”

 

“I want that too,” he says, and they kiss a little more before Sirius pulls back and takes another look at the book Remus put together for him.

 

“This is the best gift ever, Remus,” he says, beaming at it. “All of it. All those drawings – they’re incredible. I mean it, they’re the best. This is the best. You’re the best.”

 

“Oh, go on,” Remus says as Sirius goes to kiss him again. “No, I mean it. Go on.”

 

Sirius laughs and gives him a kiss that contains every compliment he could possibly pay him – you are kind, you are patient, you are loving, you make me laugh, you are so, so dear to me – and when he pulls away Remus is so dreamy eyed that he can tell his message was received.

 

“Thank you,” Remus says.

 

“What are you thanking me for?”

 

“For sitting down with me at the café that day.”

 

“Well, then I should thank you too. For letting me stay.”

 

They kiss again; they can’t help it. Their love feels so bright and new, and yet made of sturdier stuff than first kisses and dreams. There is strength in it, drawn from shared vulnerability and openness, and there is room for it to grow and grow and grow. What will come is impossible to say, but whatever does, they know that they will be together.

 

Outside the sky is a startling blue, a new day in full bloom. They go to the window to see it; they feel that they are blooming too. Out there is the sky and the wispy clouds, the trees in their autumn finery, and all the city’s buildings. One of those buildings, whether it be steel or brick or glass or stone, though they don’t know which one yet, houses the place they will both call home.

 

Sirius looks beyond the thin glow of their reflections – though is hard as ever to look away from Remus’s dearly loved face – and tries to find it: the door they will open every day, the floorboards that will squeak below their feet, the windows opening up onto a different square of the same city, and the walls that will catch the echoes of his voice as he says, _Hallo, love. I’m home! I’m finally home._


End file.
